Deerfield Doc: Stage at Fair Collapsed in 10 Seconds

“It was chaos, absolute chaos,” Dr. Dean Silas told reporters at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge on Monday about Saturday’s stage collapse at the Indiana State Fair.

You can watch his entire interview on NBC Chicago by clicking here.  

The Deerfield physician was with his family waiting for the Sugarland concert to begin when the stage collapsed, killing five people and injuring more than 40 others. 

“Everyone could see in the stadium that a storm was on the horizon,” Silas commented during a hospital press conference, but no one expected what happened next. “This gust came out of absolutely nowhere, there was no air there at all,” and then the stage suddenly collapsed he said.

During NBC’s interview, Silas said he rushed from where he was sitting in the grandstand to the stage area, “By the time that I personally had arrived most of the people injured already had somebody around them trying to administer first aid,” he said. “There was no organized command or structure, it was all spectators.”

With no emergency responders in sight, Silas quickly got to work. “We were able to successfully put people on makeshift stretchers out of fold up tables, out of wooden devices,” he recalled and then carried them from the infield to an area setup in the grandstands. “There were so many people injured.”

Silas told NBC that he tended to those wounded with leg injuries, he performed CPR, and he also saw the victims who were fatally injured, covered up with plastic. 

“I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that,” he said.    

The Indiana State Fair reopened Monday with a memorial service for the victim’s of Saturday’s disaster.