“We are in the entertainment business, not
the emergency business...aren’t we?”
- Eric Stuart QPM, BA hons (CSM), UKCMA, Director of Gentian Events Ltd.
S
o, how do we prepare for crowd
emergencies and what do those
emergencies look like? I will answer
the second one first: everything and
anything that might impact negatively,
hurt, scare, or kill your crowd should
be considered a crowd emergency.
“What? Are you mad? How can I
plan for every possibility?” I hear you
ask. Well the answer is you can’t, and
you do not have to. What you have
to do is plan to deal with reasonably
foreseeable emergencies. If we started
to make a list this article might never
finish. For example, weather. Heat,
cold, wind, rain, snow, lightning, and so
on. And not only outdoors - what if you
evacuate a theatre because of a smell
of smoke but you send people into a
raging thunderstorm?
2 Safety Scene
What about issues of overcrowding caused
by popular bands or artists, or artists who have
gained popularity because of a big hit or had
a radio interview since you booked them?
How about a stage falling down, a barrier
collapse, a DUI driving at a crowd, a fire, a
building structural failure, a drone falling from
the sky and laying smoking on the floor? Should
I go on? I haven’t even started on the terrorist
attack or the ‘fear caused by the fear’ of a
terrorist attack. The sudden bang as a barrier
falls which triggers a self-initiated evacuation
by the crowd charging towards narrow gates
that you kept narrow because you expected
people to leave over many hours - not all at
once!
I dislike the word ‘stampede’, but we are
certainly seeing more ‘stampede-like’
behaviour, as frightened people just run. Here
are just some of the many examples: the
2017 Black Friday incident at Oxford Circus,
London where 60+ people were injured as they
‘escaped’ from an innocuous fight; the crowd-
initiated evacuations at Global Gathering in
New York leaving 7 injured; the self-evacuation
of the crowd during the Toronto Raptors firearm
Fall 2019 Edition: Emergency Preparedness