A COUNCIL chief has denied his officers did not fully consider safety issues posed by an inflatable walk-in sculpture because they were excited to be hosting such a prestigious artwork.

Tony Galloway was director of development services of the since-abolished Chester-le-Street District Council, in County Durham, in July 2006 when it held an exhibition of the late Maurice Agis’s tentlike Dreamspace.

The event ended in tragedy on the second day when the structure, the size of half a football pitch, broke its moorings.

Two women, Elizabeth Anne Collings and Claire Furmedge, died when they fell from the artwork as it rose into the air and several other people were injured.

The inquest into their deaths has heard that a recently-established Safety Advisory Group – made up of council officials and the emergency services – gave its support for the event, provided queries over fire safety were answered satisfactorily.

The council’s health and safety officer, Susan Kelly, was not at the meeting, during which there was some discussion about the artwork’s anchorage system.

Mr Galloway said the group considered that the risk assessment submitted by the artist and promotions company Brouhaha International addressed the issues relating to its tethering. But he said there was no one at the meeting with the specific technical skill to analyse the adequacy of measures to be taken in the event of high winds or torrential rain.

He said the group took account of the artist operating “for some ten years’’.

Durham Coroner Andrew Tweddle suggested that hosting Dreamspace would be a “coup and a feather in the cap’’ of the council and that officers were so enthused “they didn’t really consider the pros and cons of the event itself as closely as they might have done”.

He added: “It was in effect a rubber stamp.’’ But Mr Galloway said: “I don’t think that was the case because we treated that event in the same way as we would treat any other.”

He added: “The council would not have wanted to sanction something that was inherently unsafe.’’ The inquest, at Chester-le-Street Magistrates Court, continues today.