Fundamentals of the event

Text: Aart van der Haagen

Photography: Aart van der Haagen, Gert Schoppert, Thymen Stolk, Diederick Vette.

On the one hand, the Dutch love their water; on the other hand, they do not shy away from a challenge to brave it once they want to stage an event. The organizers of The Passion, which this year took place in Dordrecht’s inner harbor, engaged Van Schie to lay down 350 pontoons for 4,000 people in the audience and a floating stage with towers. We took a look at this impressive operation.

Holland at its narrowest, but literally: trucks wriggle through the narrow streets of Dordrecht’s historic city center, with all its canals and bridges. Traffic controllers have their hands full directing the flow of transportation and rerouting passersby who must not disrupt logistics, also for their own safety. Dordrecht is buzzing with activity and then, at the time of this writing, The Passion has yet to take place: a musical telling of the Easter story, a spectacle that descends somewhere new every year and brings thousands of people to their feet. Residents of the city don’t remember the St. Martin’s Hole, where the water hides under a giant steel platform, carrying a crowd of 4,000 with ease. The four connected towers of skirted scaffolding material also float on pontoons, along with a stage four meters above the water level. Never before have so many people been able to gather around the Grote Kerk in Dordrecht, exactly the idea for the ninth edition of The Passion.

Market leader
The 350 pontoons are literally the foundation of the event. They are supplied and installed by Van Schie of Mijdrecht, the Dutch market leader in this field and a specialist in temporary accessibility facilities, which also include road plates, dragline bulkheads and – through sister company Janson Bridging – bridges. Crane rentals and transportation are also done in-house. An experienced player, this company, founded in 1962 by Jan van Schie. “His brother Gerard now runs the day-to-day operations, but Jan is still closely involved,” says commercial manager Bastiaan Hulsbos. It appears so, as the firm’s founder walks along the Maartensgat wharf and casts an approving glance at the work, which is proceeding tightly on schedule. “For placing the pontoons, we get three days and then one day remains for laying the bridges,” says Henk Plomp, rental specialist at Van Schie. “When breaking down, we even have to do it in a day less. Of all the companies involved in an event, we are always the first to arrive and the last to leave.”

On land, at sea …
While infrastructure assignments do determine the main bulk of Van Schie’s business, the events sector now occupies an important share of the business, which is to a lesser extent the case for Janson Bridging (globally operational in temporary bridges). “For the episodes of the legendary television program ‘On land, at sea and in the air,’ our pontoons were invariably used, even though you usually couldn’t see them because they were lined off,” Hulsbos says. Colleague Plomp cites a sample of the long list of events that followed, right up to the present day: “The Floriade, Sail Amsterdam, Tomorrowland, Mysteryland, Lowlands, Dance Valley, 200 years of the Kingdom, Pride Amsterdam. We not only realize temporary facilities over water, but also lay driving plates and bulkheads on soft sites, for example for a fair or a village festival.”

Tropical island
According to Plomp, the event business surprises every time, which often requires creativity. “For the finale of “Who is the Mole?” in the Vondelpark, we put pontoons in the pond, but there we cannot work with the anchoring via spud poles that we normally use, since the bottom is made of canvas. A special construction in combination with our bridges ensures that the pontoon island then stays in place.” Hulsbos: “Remember the McDonald’s television commercial with the tropical island? We built that in the Gouwzee near Monnickendam, including a ramp that went into the water and was covered with sand, to create a complete beach look. It stayed there all summer, intended for prize winners who were allowed to spend a day there. In cooperation with the Italian branch of Janson Bridging, we realized a number of pontoon bridges in Venice for a commercial by BMW, in which a man drove an 8 Series through the town, something normally impossible, of course.”

Additional challenge
Back to Dutch glory, to The Passion in Dordrecht. “It involves months of preparation in order to best carry out the client’s wishes,” Plomp says. “You have to make sure the products are in stock, arrange the crane and transportation – in this case with 20 trucks – and plan everything logistically so that you can work as efficiently as possible on site, given the tight schedule. We work out a concept based on discussions with the client. Everything starts initially with an idea, followed by a sketch, eventually followed by a final pontoon plan. We have to take everything into account, such as transport through the narrow streets with as little delay as possible for both passers-by and ourselves. An additional challenge here in Dordrecht lay in the high quays and the fact that the water level rises and falls twice a day, with a difference of one meter. The pontoon islands move with the tide by means of a vertical sliding construction along the spud poles. Naturally, the bridges must follow this change in height. We attach them to the wharf and let them roll over the pontoons in a controlled manner, so that they are not pushed away. You can see here a nice example of close cooperation with Janson Bridging.”

Panic situation
For events, Van Schie mostly uses former NATO pontoons, the smallest type in stock, with a height of 73 centimeters. “Of those, we own over 1,200,” Plomp knows. “We interconnect them using coupling manes at the top and coupling pins at the bottom. Municipalities increasingly request us to make strength and stability calculations, because they naturally want to prevent incidents like the one in Alphen aan den Rijn – with the toppling cranes – with all their might.” Hulsbos adds: “Safety is given top priority. Bear in mind that while 4,000 men ensure an even load on our pontoons, something very different happens when a panic situation arises and everyone suddenly runs to one side. Even then the structure must remain stable. We are the only supplier in the Netherlands to perform the strength and stability calculations in-house. Our engineers in this field can even create simulations on the computer and 3D views.”

Certified
The construction of the pontoons for the music platform was done in consultation with the stage builder. Plomp: “We had to get a clean picture of the loose elements that will be on it, such as portacabins and containers, but also movable items. Think for example of the flight cases with audiovisual equipment. The organizers of The Passion wanted a nice finished stage with a number of towers. That catches a relatively large amount of wind, so you have to use a calculation to determine whether you may need to build more pontoons to ensure stability.” Extraordinary service during construction proves the mobile tower crane. “That slides the pontoons, as it were, from the car lengthwise to the water, via a trolley over the long boom. That saves a lot of time and also provides a solution in tight environments, such as here in Dordrecht.” Van Schie is now introducing an innovative solution that saves hours and reduces the number of transport movements, namely pontoons with integrated rather than separate couplers. “It is the type VSP770, actually specially developed and certified for the infrastructure sector, but also perfectly applicable at events,” Hulsbos said. “We are now starting series production. This further expands our facility package, in line with our motto ‘nothing is impossible’. That fits Van Schie just as well as the down-to-earth and pragmatic approach our company has taken for 57 years.”