Event Safety Insights Issue Three | Spring 2017 | Page 41

was doubtless not their first rodeo, had blocked their own
emergency exit, or that the program staff ignored our fac-
ulty screaming and mockery for three days until they finally
deigned to have the hazard removed.
When I finished my duties that week, I figured that this was an
isolated incident of gross incompetence, of the utter absence
of situational awareness. I was soon to be set straight.
Just two months later, I was asked to lead crowd manager
training in another hotel conference room. Once again, the
screen blocked the emergency exit doors. But this time, the
obstruction was designed and built into the room. So add
the architect and code officials who created and signed off as
perhaps not as situationally aware as one might hope.
SITUATIONAL AWARENESS DEFINED
It is important to define our terms. I didn’t figure this one
would be hard, and it wasn’t. Here is the definition of “situa-
tional awareness” from the U.S. Coast Guard’s training mate-
rials, which are consistent with the other definitions I’ve seen:
Situational Awareness is the ability to identify,
process, and comprehend the critical elements
of information about what is happening to the
team with regards to the mission.
More simply, it’s knowing what is going on around you.
SITUATIONAL AWARENESS APPLIED
Applying the definition is obviously the harder part. It’s fine
to say that everyone should know what is going on around
them, but as my fun little examples suggest, we would be
wrong to assume that even people who have no function
other than to be situationally aware actually do know what’s
going on around them.
Add the fact that many venue and event jobs are part-time,
seasonal, hourly, and relatively low-paid and you have what
one smart client of mine refers to as an “opportunity.”
Let’s begin our analysis with the right foundational question.
Given that everyone has a legal duty to behave reasonably
under the circumstances, the logical question is, What should
a reasonable person do with such an opportunity?
Some of the widely-discussed options to enhance safety and
security these days include walk-through magnetometers or
hand wands to detect prohibited metal objects, additional
security guards to expand bag checks and pat-downs, more
off-duty law enforcement officers to add a uniformed pres-
ence to t-shirt security, and even dogs to detect bombs or
drugs.
These are fine options, but they do little on their own to add
situational awareness. Magnetometers must be calibrated,
and can be adjusted to emphasize either sensitivity to prohib-
ited items or speed to keep the line moving into the venue.
Likewise with bag checks and pat-downs, the guards post-
ed to the points of ingress might have varying knowledge of
what is going on around them. (Ask me sometime for the ad-
ventures three of us had at a major arena using only our idle
curiosity and a Wallet Ninja. http://www.walletninja.com/)
Cases have crossed my desk in which guards exhibited an
allegedly insufficient understanding of when or how to use
force on a guest, or how to eject someone from the premises.
I do not mean to single out private security. To the contrary,
I begin with them only because so many proposed security
solutions require more guards. I am also a fan of technolog-
ical enhancements that preserve objective information re-
corded in real time, such as comprehensive CCTV and inci-
dent reporting software. This sort of data is more reliable than
witness accounts, making the job of a lawyer much easier. But
even these tools rarely help prevent incidents – I like them
because they help me distinguish who did right from who did
wrong after the fact, in litigation.
HOPE IS NOT A PLAN
If a reasonable person looking to address the usual gaps in
situational awareness cannot just spend his way out of the
problem – if quality and not quantity is the answer – then
where does one begin? Personally, I look to the wisdom of
Van Halen.
You probably know the story that back in the 1980s, the Van
Halen tour rider specified that there be no brown M&Ms.
(http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/van-halens-legend-
ary-mms-rider?page=0) Such rock and roll divas, right? But
David Lee Roth explained in a video years later (http://www.
npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/02/14/146880432/the-
truth-about-van-halen-and-those-brown-m-ms) that it was a
litmus test for the promoter, a proxy for the band asking if
their huge tour set-up had been done safely and correctly.
They figured that if the promoter was attentive to this silly de-
mand in the middle of a long tour rider, then other details
would be handled equally well.
I like this approach. If I ask someone outright if they know
what’s going on around them, of course they will confidently
say Yes. Here’s a hint: when everyone answers a question the
same way, it’s probably not a good question. So I look to see
if the details are right.
I typically ask to see a venue’s emergency plan. If someone
first has to find it, or blow dust off the cover, I consider that a
clue. I will ask for a promoter’s severe weather plan – I con-
sider a blank stare to be a bad sign for more than just storm
readiness. And when someone hands me a contract to re-
view, if it lacks some of the basic boilerplate that should be in
every contract, that tells me that the drafter borrowed some-
one else’s document and didn’t recognize the significance of
everything they were looking at, so they kept only the provi-
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