EDMONTON - A year after some of his support crew was injured when a stage collapsed last year at an Alberta country music festival, actor and musician Kevin Costner admits that a ripple of nerves now goes through band members when the weather turns bad at outdoor gigs.

One woman was killed and 75 others were injured Aug. 1, 2009 when a freak wind storm plowed through an area near Camrose, southeast of Edmonton, collapsing the main stage at the Big Valley Jamboree.

Costner and his band Modern West were just about to take the stage when parts of the structure fell, and the horrifying aftermath has scarred them all, he said Friday.

"Whenever the wind has blown whenever we've been on an outside stage, I see them get a little edgy," Costner said of his bandmates.

"They'll hear a noise and they'll look in a way they may not have a day earlier. So it has marked them and changed them."

Costner arrived in Edmonton for the band's latest appearance at the annual concert, unsure of how he'll feel when they again wait in the wings watching the sky.

"We almost had a loss of life in two or three instances. We were blessed, we were lucky," Costner said.

The weather in the Edmonton region has hovered in the high 20s the past few days, humidity is high and thunderstorms have been rippling through every few days -- very similar to the kind that spawned the deadly wind storm last year.

Costner said the memories of something he described as being like a "bad Godzilla movie" are still sharp.

The powerful winds ripped through the concert site last year with only a minute's warning.

Standing backstage then, as the wind began to pick up and the sky turned from blue to yellow, Costner remembers how quickly the chaos unfolded.

"The wind became an animal. You could see almost in slow motion, the big tarps started to move and something felt terribly, terribly wrong," said Costner.

Then the wind began hurling pebbles into the air and some of them struck him in the face. That's when he knew it was a bad situation.

Suddenly, the stage came crashing down all around them and people were running everywhere -- mirroring the make-believe chaos the famed director has seen during movie shoots.

He remembers raising his arms as a portion of the steel stage rigging and heavy netting material fell towards him and pinned him to the ground.

A friend narrowly escaped being impaled. After struggling out from under the debris, Costner saw his road manager cut up and covered in blood. He remembers trying to stop the flow of blood, holding his friend in his arms and thinking he might die.

"I realized how tenuous life is," Costner said.

But the show must go on and the band thought it important to return to the event, he said.

"You can't go through life being a scaredy-cat ... we're going to turn the music up and celebrate our lives and try to think back, remember those who aren't and the moment of terror everybody felt."

Costner and Modern West are scheduled to play on the main stage on Saturday.

The jamboree is expected to draw thousands of people and headliners such as Martina McBride and Keith Urban.

While the Alberta government has not toughened its building code in the wake of the tragedy, it has said inspectors were on hand when the stage was built for this year's event. It's also working to establish a permit system for stages at major events.