4 Steps to Take to Ensure Safety at a Large Event
If you are putting on a large, special event, you need to have a plan for security. You need to develop a security plan that will allow the event to run smoothly, and you need to hire a professional security team to help you pull off your security plan.
Step #1: Know Your Risks
When you throw an event, you need to evaluate all the risks that your event presents. Are there any threats against the participants of the event your team needs to be aware of? Is there a heightened level of security due to any community security threats? Are there any organizations that may protest your event.
It is important to know if there are any outside risks that you need to be on patrol for that could impact your event. If there are, everyone on your team needs to know about them, and you need a plan to keep these threats from becoming anything more than that.
Step #2: Have a Crowd Management Plan
For a big event, you need to have a plan to manage the crowd. You need to have specific entry and exit points that will allow you to keep track of the number of people in attendance. You need to make sure the layout of the event will keep people moving and will prevent bottlenecking in areas, which can present a security risk.
Step #3: Develop an Evacuation Plan
Hopefully, your event will go off flawlessly. However, if something does happen and you have to evacuate your event, you need to have a plan that will allow everyone to leave in an orderly and safe manner.
Your security team needs to know exactly where to direct people in the event of an emergency. You also need well-labeled emergency exit paths, so if people need to leave quickly, they will know where to go.
Step #4: Create Contingency Plans
You also need to have contingency plans in place in case an emergency doesn't happen, but something doesn't go as planned. For example, what will you do if the power goes out? How will you keep people calm and get the power back on? Examine your event and come up with a list of things that could go wrong, and then create a list of how you would want your security team to respond to each scenario.
Ideally, your security team will primarily stand around, keep track of attendance, and direct people where to go. However, you need to plan for what your security team needs to do should something go wrong, and they need to act. With a big event, it is better to over-plan your security response than it is to under plan your security response.
For more information, contact security services like Protection Plus.
