Gatherings
xity, Coupling,
ccident Theory
By Emma Parkinson
areas in large volumes, do everything possible to stagger those moves – overlap similar artists to reduce the
potential for mass crowd shift at the end of each set or
separate key attractions in such a way as to make the
move between them unattractive. Using a mixture of
police and private security providers? Make sure they
have discrete responsibilities to prevent issues of confusion with regard to who is doing what. Got a centralized control function? Consider devolving control of
individual areas to dedicated teams who can concentrate on problem areas alone without the distraction of
the wider site. Simplify, simplify simplify, so that one
malfunction doesn’t have the opportunity to interact
with another.
Step two is to ensure that where fast-paced coupling
exists, the systems designed to manage it can react at a
similar speed to any potential unfolding incident. One
of the key features of Hillsborough was the rigidly hierarchical command structure, with a single police officer
taking all significant decisions. By the time information
about the problem reached him, people were dying:
in the time it took him to react and provide a response,
people were dead. Communications were of poor
quality, runners were used in place of radios and people felt that they couldn’t act without the Commander’s
say-so: a single person became another weak point in
a chain that was already badly compromised.
To resolve such issues in tightly-coupled organizations it’s vital to consider an approach of “subsidiarity”
where decisions are taken at the lowest appropriate level and coordination happens at the
highest necessary level. In such systems staff at
all relevant levels are trained and – just as importantly – empowered and supported to take
the potentially life-saving decisions, unencumbered by a management hierarchy that might
slow them down while they wait for advice or
response. Consider the well-trained pit-spotter with the power to stop the largest show or
a low-level security officer, trained to move
a crowd to safety in the event of an attack: in
shaving seconds or minutes off a response a
critical incident might be forestalled.
Of course this is easy to write and far harder to
achieve: such is the complexity of the systems
in which we operate that the impacts of decisions by individuals throughout the chain can
have far-reaching effects, themselves adding
to the problems we seek to resolve. Through
planning and training, however, key roles and
positions can be identified where fast-paced
coupling can be matched. We might not be
able to cheat the frailty of the human bodies
we’re tasked with looking after, but that’s no
reason to not do our best to out-run the reaper.
Emma Parkinson is Senior Lecturer in Emergency Planning and Management at Coventry University, where she delivers programmes in a range
of areas in the field and focuses in particular on organizational cultures,
integrated emergency planning and risk management. Before her academic career, Emma was the manager of the UK’s largest dedicated
stewarding company, providing more than 8,000 voluntary stewards a
year to major national events including Glastonbury, Bestival, Leeds and
Reading festivals. A specialist in crowd safety and large-scale security
management, she continues to practise in both these fields as well as
pursuing her research interests into near miss reporting and the issues
of risk management in temporary organizational cultures.
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