From festivals to football, emergency preplanning for assembly events is critical

By Stephen Nardi

We are sitting in the tail end of the music-festival season, having recently wrapped up Lollapalooza in Chicago and with Burning Man ongoing in the Black Rock Desert. “Lolla” draws 300,000 over three days for a very good time on the confined lawns of Grant Park. More than 70,000 attend the one-week fest in the Nevada desert.

These are two of the more than 170 summer music festivals. In total, as many as 32 million people attend music festivals a year, according to a 2015 Nielsen study. And we’ve transitioned from summer to fall. This weekend, football stadiums that range in capacity from a few hundred to more than 100,000 will begin to fill. The parties begin early in sprawling parking lots and fields, well before fans enter the high-security confines of the stadium. Per NFL and NCAA statistics, more than 17 million and almost 50 million fans, respectively, attended football games in the 2015 season.

Each of these assembly events is a soft target for incidents triggered by accident or on purpose. Atrocities in Paris at the Stade de France and in Nice at the Promenade des Anglais have reminded us that these events are not immune to acts of terror—foreign or domestic, coordinated or lone wolf, in the name of something big or small.

These assembly events need to be incident preplanned, so first responders can react with knowledge, to save lives and property.

In 2015, the Chicago Tribune outlined Lollapalooza’s severe-weather evacuation plans, which include cooperation from the city's emergency management office, police and fire departments. Improvements were made after there was confusion two years prior about where to go for shelter. As regular as it is for festivals to have weather-related evacuation plans, it is not yet a standard operating procedure for event producers to think beyond dangerous weather.

Who may have special needs? What do the floor plans look like? How is the campus or the surrounding neighborhood laid out? Where are exits and escape routes? Are there safe rooms? Where are utility shut-off locations? Are there hazardous materials on site?

These are questions relevant to all kinds of large events, not just those held within a facility. There are preplan technologies available that need to play a role in event emergency response, whether it is in an open space or inside a facility. The modern emergency-response preplan program needs to be all-digital and operable, both online and offline. Moreover, it needs to be shareable between event operators and first responders.