There’s No, Like, Training

In a watershed year for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade that includes the first Latina character ever, the Times sounds the alarm about balloon safety:

After volunteers at the 1997 Thanksgiving Day parade lost control of a balloon in the wind, nearly killing a 33-year-old woman, Macy’s said that balloon handlers would never again be sent down Central Park West and Broadway without proper training.

Though the company welcomed the press to watch as it trained a thousand balloon handlers on an empty soccer field in Hoboken, N.J., in 1998, over the years Macy’s has quietly backed away from that assurance, internal company documents and interviews with handlers show. So tomorrow, with forecasters calling for rain and heavy winds, many untrained volunteers will help wrangle flopping towers of polyurethane through Midtown guided only by instruction sheets reminiscent of airline safety cards.

“There’s no, like, training,” said one first-time handler who was given an instruction sheet and told to report for duty at 6 a.m. tomorrow. John Piper, vice president of Macy’s Parade Studio, which is owned by the company and charged with supervising 2,000 balloon handlers, said Macy’s held four training sessions a year and invited all volunteers, though the training was mandatory only for a few hundred team leaders.

The bombshell article explores the instruction sheets, which obviously include important safety information:

A chart marked Balloon Handlers Instruction Guide explains hand signals with sketches of a torso in a baseball cap marked with arrows for forward, slow down, stop, left turn and right turn. Another sketch marked Landing a Balloon shows four figures holding a rope just below chest level while two others bend down, appearing to tie their shoes.

“Continue to hold your lines, until the balloon is stabilized,” the section concludes. “Please do not inhale helium escaping from the balloon.”