Event Safety Insights Issue Three | Spring 2017 | Page 21

nearer the danger, the delay to action was nearly 5 minutes! Normal-
cy bias will kill us unless we train ourselves to overcome it.
Clever scientists talk about us having two brains, the emotional brain
that lets us rationalise and consider things, and the lizard brain that
just acts and reacts. The more developed the rational brain, the
smaller the lizard brain and the slower it comes into play. Humans
have the largest emotional brain and as such the lizard brain is some-
times painfully slow to kick in.
It takes time for the brain to process this new, strange and sometimes
overwhelming information and recognize that the disaster is real: un-
less you know to expect them or have trained to override them.
Not sure about this? Well, neither was I, but try reading Amanda Rip-
ley’s 2008 book, ‘The Unthinkable – Who Survives When Disaster
Strikes and When’.
Because we can control it if we think consciously of it and recognise
it when it comes. We can train ourselves to overcome normalcy bias.
We can think the unthinkable and be ready for when it happens. Be-
cause when it does, we may be one of just a few on site that will act
as the grown-ups for everyone else who is there. We will be sober,
we will be sharp and we will react to save the public who will have
no idea what is happening for the first few minutes or what to do
about it.
Yet there is one more area which we need to investigate and be
both brave and bold in tackling. That is the well-meaning but nar-
row minded security advisor, whose security blinkers allow them to
see only one type of danger. Yes, I will do everything in my pow-
er, experience, ability and my budget to stop the terrorists getting
through but no, I will not do that at the expense of all other factors.
I will argue with police and security advisors who think it’s all about
terrorism and who try to implement measures that in themselves may
threaten safety.
On 12th June last year, Omar Matine attacked the Pulse nightclub in
Florida killing 49 people. On 25th June we had Pride in London and
on the 6th August, Brighton Pride, one of the largest in Europe. We
have just had the two biggest Pride events in the UK with no issues,
one of them just weeks after the Orlando attack and with very limited
visible increase in security. The London Pride event was complicated
yet enhanced by the fact that we had just voted in a new Mayor for
London, Sadiq Khan, a Muslim and London’s first Muslim Mayor. He
insisted on leading the procession and in doing so probably making
him and his family vulnerable forevermore to those who would de-
spise his association with our LGBTQ+ community. And of course he
did it in London, on open streets and in an area where accreditation
was a total waste of time as tourists strolled past with suitcases. What
could possibly go wrong?
Yet at Notting Hill Carnival this year, just a few weeks after Brighton
Pride, one million people attended in just two days. It is certainly a
crowded event, in the media spotlight and would be a great target.
The police must have feared a Nice-Style lorry attack? Surely that is
what they had in mind when they placed hostile vehicle mitigation
(HVM) at the main entry points. The problem was they obstructed
roads used by tens of thousands during ingress and egress, but
would certainly have been needed in an evacuation. The police
‘stole’ 80% of the road width that I would have calculated as neces-
sary evacuation width. Late in the afternoon of day two, with a crowd
at a density of one person per two square feet, a ‘steaming’ gang of
young men armed with knives and intent on snatching jewellery and
phones ran through the crowd. The reaction of the crowd was to get
away, quickly. They tried, but there was nowhere to run to, and as a
result many fell, many had to be rescued from the floor by medical
teams and police. Upwards of 100 people were being trampled and
were rescued according to reports from officers who were on the
ground that day.
But that was a short sharp incident. What of a prolonged gun attack
with people running for cover but being blocked by HVM across the
road? Even without any such attack, the crowds of people struggling
to get through narrowed pavements was dangerous enough but
thousands were gathered outside trying to get through the restric-
tion, themselves becoming a perfect target for that which the HVM
was supposed to prevent. Security out of balance with safety?
It is just one small example of where the focus on security had an
impact on safety. Frustratingly as far back as 2007, I had fought the
use of concrete blockers on the streets of Notting Hill for the Carnival
for two reasons:
1. They cause crowd congestion at the entrance to the site
and as such then create a bigger crowd than would oth-
erwise have occurred.
2. If a car bomb were to drive up to them and detonate,
they create a massive cloud o f concrete shrapnel to rip
apart the crowd on the other side of the barrier.
To prove it, we actually experimented with a concrete blocker at a
military establishment in the UK. A smallish explosion next to a con-
crete blocker pulverised the material into shards that were anything
from the size of pebble to that of a brick, all made of concrete, most-
ly razor sharp and all heading towards the ‘crowd’.
Back in 2007, the idea was immediately shelved but it took me quite
a fight to get the ‘security’ guys to see that side of things. Then I
learned from history that we had not learned from history as I ar-
rived at the 2016 Brighton Pride (on the south coast of England) and
see the same blockers being used to keep out terrorists. What ex-
actly was it meant to achieve? Yes, it keeps the lorry from driving
through the crowd but it also adds shrapnel if it detonates outside.
We need to think beyond the immediate
solution to one problem and avoid creating
another equally dangerous one.
Our 2016 conference room was full of experience in the events in-
21