The Game Plan

Stadium managers can always expect a baseline of mischief and misconduct at any sporting event, but, when tens of thousands of people gather in one place, real threats to public safety emerge, increasing the chance of something going wrong. While threats like an active shooter or improvised explosive device (IED) are always a top priority, the more likely emergency would be a security breach or aggressive groups of fans.

The lawlessness witnessed at the EURO 2020 Final in London is a prime example. Stadium managers were reminded that even sporting events on a global stage are prone to threats and disruptions. During the event, more than 2,000 ticketless fans breached the gates of Wembley Stadium and forced their way into the final between Italy and England, creating a chaotic and potentially life-threatening situation. Fortunately, there were no fatalities, but the English Football Association’s (FA) reputation was tarnished, and investigations were launched into the FA’s handling of the situation. While a series of near misses kept the situation from escalating, there was a visible lack of adequate preparation and anticipation.

Thinking ahead, stadium facility managers should use the events that transpired in London as a reminder that any stadium of any size must be optimally prepared for all forms of risk. To be ready, FMs must be equipped with the best strategies and technologies to respond to any emergency.

With the potential for a massive disaster always looming, it is natural for any stadium FM to experience anxiety heading into game day. The work of emergency managers determines how much risk is contained and can make the difference between a minor inconvenience and a full-scale activation. The damage caused by a stadium disaster — to life and reputation — is often irreparable. A sporting organization cannot afford to ignore the potential impact of a disaster on its brand and business continuity.

The sheer unpredictability of emergencies makes addressing them even more difficult. Whether it be a natural disaster or a planned attack, having an emergency management platform and response plan in place to create a common operating picture is crucial in achieving optimal preparedness during an emergency.

Planning

Coaches tell their players practice makes perfect. A better way to express this as it applies to emergency preparedness is practice makes permanent. The first step to improving preparedness is revisiting and reviewing emergency action plans, response guides and other critical processes to ensure that everything is still relevant and actionable.

Some of the best practices for reviewing emergency plans and procedures, in accordance with Homeland Security’s Evacuation Planning Guide for Stadiums, are:

• Conducting a risk assessment to identify potential emergency threats
• Identifying key personnel who will be involved in response to a perceived threat
• Identifying stakeholders and local and state agencies that will be involved in response efforts
• Creating specific plans, procedures, and protocols for response
• Establishing an incident command center for coordination of response and communications
• Developing procedures for coordinating critical event response across multiple locations
• Compiling all forms to be used, including incident reports and forms for insurance purposes
• Seeking input on the preparedness plan from all community stakeholders, including law enforcement, fire, medical/hospital and public health

A clear plan must be in place to ensure a safe environment for athletics. Yet these plans cannot operate independently; they must be paired with emergency preparedness technology to be successfully implemented in real-world scenarios.

Sometimes, threats can even emerge after the final whistle. A recent example is a stand collapsing at the Stadion de Goffert in the Netherlands in October of 2021. While Vitesse fans were celebrating in the stands following an away victory over NEC Nihmegen, the stand holding the set of away fans collapsed, leading to a truly harrowing scene. Thankfully, like EURO 2020, there were no fatalities, but any stadium FM must be prepared for all sorts of emergencies, even structural ones.

Having pre-determined, crisis-specific workflows are necessary for any stadium emergency preparedness plan. Emergency management technology provides the customizable and dynamic workflows necessary for managing and mitigating risks while providing situational awareness, tracking, communications, monitoring and reporting capabilities.

Training

Stadium managers must also adequately train their staff in crisis management to fully benefit from a comprehensive emergency management procedure. Training in emergency response is just as crucial for crisis management teams as practice is for players. Any new employee should go through job-specific training to learn how to perform their regular duties, operate equipment and understand the expectations around organizational policies. Unfortunately, new employees are often not taught emergency response protocol. If they are informed about emergency response, their training usually is not all-encompassing, only glossing over the stadium’s procedures and guidelines. At the very least, a baseline emergency training program should be mandatory for all stadium employees. The training should cover stadium-specific policies and procedures, which may include:

• Individual roles and responsibilities
• Various threats, hazards, and emergencies
• Emergency equipment and how to use it
• Communication and notification protocol
• Emergency response procedures
• Shelter in place and evacuations
• Emergency shutdown procedures

Stadium staff must be able to act swiftly and effectively. All employees must be trained in emergency response, from security guards to stewards. To realize the full benefits of staff training, reinforcement training sessions should be used to build on the skills and knowledge received during baseline training sessions. Drills and simulations are another essential component of effective emergency response training, giving employees real-life crisis experience. These practices will ensure that response efforts holistically reflect the stadium’s commitment to safety while empowering every team member to serve a purpose effectively.

Staff must also understand the organization’s chain of responsibility. In an emergency, key stakeholders will experience an uptick in stress, regardless of their need to effectively share information and navigate a course of action that will yield the best outcome. Having templates that create clear chains of responsibility and action will prove advantageous. These templates identify critical information, specific individuals and responsibilities, and backup options if primary communication networks are no longer available.

Comprehensive situational awareness

Maintaining situational awareness is the foundation of emergency management and public safety. In the event of a disaster, the situation inside and around the stadium can evolve rapidly. A complete understanding of circumstances, data and up-to-the-minute information is required to make frequent and rapid operational decisions successfully. The centralization of all data and information is crucial to comprehensive situational awareness. Without quick and efficient data sharing, key stakeholders are left in the dark, limiting the speed of response to any incident.

Leveraging technology that creates a common operating picture improves situational awareness, ensuring that information is reliable and accurate across multiple locations and that all stakeholders are working from the same data set. Stadium managers can create a fully comprehensive common operating picture by combining a centralized cloud-based solution and connected devices with an emergency preparedness plan.

Dashboards that hold critical information in an easily viewable format are essential to any emergency management platform. Real-time operational status and visibility of available resources help provide organized summaries to the right people in the right positions, enabling prompt, well-organized and effective incident response.

Emergency management platforms exponentially increase an organization’s situational awareness capabilities by providing:

• A common operating picture including organization-wide, community, and state-level events
• Operational status and visibility of resources available in real-time
• A centralized location for situational awareness, available across multiple locations and devices at any time
• The ability to simplify processes and standardize communication effectively with students, athletes, staff, and stakeholders during events or emergency situations
• The ability to identify roles and actions of emergency response teams

Streamlining communication

No matter how prepared stadium FMs and their staff are for disaster, a successful outcome will fall by the wayside if they cannot effectively communicate with emergency personnel and stakeholders during an incident. During the heat of a crisis, there may be a loss of communication or degraded communication capabilities. Athletic organizations need a centralized emergency communication platform with the means to contact everyone who could be impacted and keep them constantly and consistently informed.

Critical to contacting and keeping key stakeholders up to date with the latest developments, a centralized communication platform allows stadium managers to instantly connect with leadership, athletes, spectators, emergency responders, and the media.

To ensure optimal communications, organizations should:

• Develop communication mechanisms or implement a platform for centralizing information and creating notifications for stakeholders, key incident response personnel, and others who are impacted
• Create and keep up-to-date contact lists for communication during and after an emergency or incident
• Be prepared to promptly communicate with leadership, athletes, staff, members of the media or anyone who may be affected

Emergency managers who take the necessary steps to enable proactive emergency response to have the greatest chance of successful crisis intervention. With thousands of fans gathering in one place, the need for optimal preparedness must be abundantly clear to stadium FMs. The planning, investment, and training done in the offseason will allow athletes, spectators, staff and everyone in between to enjoy the game while staying safe.