It is barely reported now that three terrorist bombers were outside the Stade de France where the French National Soccer team were playing Germany , watched by the President Francois Hollande . The fact that they arrived twenty minutes after kick off must have raised some suspicion . It now seems that only one was going to enter and detonate whilst two others would have detonated bombs during an evacuation . Certainly it would appear that only one had a ticket so it seems a likely scenario !
That one was stopped by security as he tried to enter . He left and blew himself up , killing a bystander seconds later . The other two simply blew themselves up . Why didn ’ t they all wait for an hour , just wait for the end of the game ? Why didn ’ t they join their colleagues in Central Paris to add to the carnage there ?
That night , a call to ‘ invacuate ’, or keep everyone inside seems like a good one in the circumstances and one we must all consider as part of our plans looking forward . Certainly , evacuation is in itself an inherently dangerous procedure . If we have a secure venue and are confident in our processes , then keeping people inside must be an option we consider . It is lit , stewarded , has food and water and as far as we can tell , is more secure than the outside world . Even if an attack occurs inside , do we know that is not a precursor to a bigger one as people leave . One thing is certain , the ‘ security advisor ’ is going to have to work hard to persuade me that outside is a safer place than inside before I press the evacuation button .
I talked a little of Hillsborough last year [ 2015 Event Safety Summit ]. In 1989 , amidst a flurry of calls that people were dying , with almost no training and limited experience , a senior police officer listened to the calls of his colleagues from the ground ( and those on horseback ). He heard and ‘ knew ’ that fans were late , they often were in those days . They were supposedly drunk . Again , not uncommon . Some had no tickets , which was fairly normal for a game of this nature .
Despite all of this being pretty foreseeable , there was no plan , or at least not a properly thought through plan . The ‘ distal causation ’ of Hillsborough started years before with poor planning and a very poor stadium in both design and maintenance .
But that was all too far away for David Duckenfield , Police Superintendent of South Yorkshire Police to change . He had an immediate problem . He knew people were getting injured , crushed , maybe about to die . ‘ So what ’ – It was his job to do something , to stop them dying . ‘ Now what ’ – Make a decision – open the gate – phew , it worked , people are no longer getting crushed .
But then what ? It seems there was no ‘ then what ’ and 96 people died because the gate led directly into an area where others were already getting crushed . I don ’ t blame David Duckenfield for those deaths , though he blames himself . He did what 99 % of people would have done , he fixed the problem and breathed a sigh of relief .
How many of you have finished a gig and taken a deep breath , maybe a long beer ( or stronger ) and thought ‘ we got away with that one ’. It happens , it isn ’ t a great feeling , but it happens . What is unforgivable is to find yourself on a job months later realising you got away with it again and the same things happened but you still were not ready for them . We need to learn and not move on so quickly . We need to retrain ourselves to prepare for the worst . We need to accept one day it may happen and it will be up to us to fix it .
Our brains take time to accept change , just look at the runners at the end of the Boston Marathon . Many continued the race , not because of a selfish desire to finish , but because of a deep ancient physiological aspect of our DNA . We suffer from ‘ Normalcy Bias ’, our inability to accept that something has just happened that we hadn ’ t expected when we woke up and planned our day . It is not that we are not smart , we are , but this is deep and primeval occurring in a place deep in the brain where we are not too good at controlling ( more later ).
We don ’ t like danger ; we don ’ t cope with it occurring to us too often , so our brains try to help us see the best in any given situation .
On 9 / 11 , the people on the ground floor in the first tower of the World Trade Center took an average of 3 minutes to respond to the screaming engine jets above their heads , the massive explosion that shook the building , a smell of aviation fuel and debris falling past their windows . Three minutes talking to colleagues , finishing emails , logging off computers , collecting belongings , looking for a leader to tell them what to do . On the higher floors , nearer the impacts and