| Special events business continuity management David Honour explores this specialist area. It’s Friday evening at a major entertainment venue. An incident in the crowd induces a state of mass panic among 10,000 highly excited and possibly inebriated young people stuck inside a dark and crowded venue. How do you control the crowd and get them to leave out of the designated exits in an orderly fashion, thus preventing a dangerous free-for-all? This scenario effectively demonstrates just how wide-ranging business continuity management really is. The term ‘business continuity’ is often mistakenly used solely in the context of assuring the availability of information technology systems but, in fact, business continuity relates to any aspect of protecting a company’s activities from disruption, damage or disaster.
Business continuity management involves two main elements: preventative measures and reactive measures. The above scenario is a great example for demonstrating the importance of prevention. With an incident such as this there is no room for making plans after the crisis has started to take place; there is no time for discussion. Every second counts and the reactive measures that can be taken are based on careful planning, clear documentation and extensive training. This ensures that incident response is calm, controlled, automatic and successful. PREVENTATIVE MEASURES A special event should be treated as an individual project. No two events are exactly the same, so, whilst many elements of a special event contingency plan will be reusable, nothing should be assumed. The first step in developing a special event contingency plan is to establish a planning committee. This should involve senior members from all major organisations involved in staging the event. These people must have the authority to make executive decisions. The committee should have a defined leader / chair who would normally be from the lead organisation. The committee’s role is to identify potential risks and threats and to create a contingency plan that will address these. The committee also ensures that all stakeholders in the special event are communicating and on the same wavelength. Once the committee has been established the next steps are to: Conduct a risk assessment Risks that need to be looked for include pinch points, where congestion can occur. This can be either side of an access control point or at various other locations such as corridors, entrances and exits. By identifying risk areas plans can be made to either change the layout, include some crowd management structures or increase staffing in these areas. The fire risk must be accessed. This will depend on structural elements, such as the type of building materials, flooring, furnishing etc that have been used, but will also be affected by the type of event: the equipment used; the likely behaviour of the crowd (certain types of event are more likely to attract smokers that others); and the use of special effects, especially pyrotechnics. The adequacy of fire extinguishing systems for the needs of the individual event must be assessed and extra equipment brought in if necessary. Similarly, the clarity of emergency exit signage and information should be assessed and improved if necessary, as must the efficiency of public address systems. The HSE makes the point that clear signposts and simple, audible public address messages are vital. Poor communications can lead to people stopping, moving against the flow of the crowd, blocking passages or making frequent demands on staff for directions. It is important to research and assess the type of audience expected and any special risks that these present. For instance, a party political conference will bring heightened security and terrorism risks; while an event such as our scenario may present special physical risks, such as moshing. Moshing environments include such behaviour as violent crowd surges, crowd ‘surfing’ and intense crushes. The type of audience will also influence the required density of safety and security personnel as well as the likelihood that public safety announcements will be listened to and followed. Other particular hazards that risk assessors
should be on the look out for are, according to the HSE: Prepare a formal safety plan Inspect the venue prior to the event Establish a control centre
If the decision is made to control, security staff would immediately be informed by radio to make their way to the centre of the incident. They would then use their people skills to instil clam and reassert control over the crowd, they would also use appropriate force to control people acting violently or who are refusing to listen to safety instructions. A decision may also be made to call in support from the police force. If the decision it made that it is safer to evacuate, then pre-planned procedures would come into play. For the type of event in our scenario, these would normally be along the lines of: * The event controller will issue a ‘red
alert’ command over the radio communications system, all staff
will then immediately proceed to conduct their pre-determined evacuation
role. This is only an overview of what is a complex and specialist subject. It does, however, illustrate very clearly how comprehensive and well informed planning is the essence of any business continuity process. As a wise industry sage once said: ‘If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.’ David Honour is editor of Continuity Central. This article was first published in Enterprise Risk magazine.
•Date:
9th December 2003 •Region: Worldwide•Type:
Article •Topic: BC
general |
