Park Security
www.parkworld-online.com
quickly come to mind are having a security presence throughout the area where people are walking from their cars and where they wait to enter. Increase your standoff distances. Evaluate the
effectiveness of your bollards and barriers, and discuss the feasibility of pushing the drop off locations a little further away. If you provide shuttles, have your drivers attend a class on what behaviors to look for, and how to report them if spotted. Usually your local law enforcement agencies have expertise in this, or can arrange it at little or no cost. The trainings and exercises that could be conducted for this threat are endless. A few of the most needed would be:
• Train and exercise the bag checkers. Train them well, and let them know there will be sporadic drills, like at an airport, to see what gets through. Reward staff who perform well.
• Train and exercise the parking lot workers. Teach them to recognise what is out of place, what to look for, and how to report. They are the very first wave of security and they need to be informed of their responsibilities.
• Tabletop exercise a vehicle that gets used as a weapon. Gather stakeholders together and discuss what happens in the moments, the hours, and the days after a vehicle hops a curb and creates a mass casualty event on your property.
• Exercise lone wolf attacks. Red Team your plans and venue. Red teaming is a military term used to describe those who take on the role of a devil’s advocate in regards to your venue. Trade this service with nearby or peer attractions, your people for their people, to keep it low key and manageable. Better yet, hire out the job, and get some fresh eyes from afar who look at your location with ill intent and give you an honest assessment of your vulnerabilities.
• Exercise suspicious packages. Tabletops and drills would work best here as a follow up to training. If you have trained your employees on the procedures for dealing with suspicious packages, then routinely place suspicious packages around the venue and reward employees for following policy and reporting in a timely manner. It goes without saying this is an innocuous bag or box that is always under surveillance by a drill controller and not a bomb look alike that ticks.
• Tabletop the mass casualty event. Imagine the scenario from different perspectives. One tabletop could be with just your media relations and public affairs personnel and the impact to the brand. A car driving through a crowd waiting to get into XYZ venue is going to quickly become known as the XYZ venue attack. Another tabletop could be held with local responders and focus only on discussing ingress and egress issues. That exercise could be a stepping stone to a follow up drill or full-scale. The possibilities are endless with just a single scenario. If looked at from different functions or plan sections.
• Tabletop the holidays. Crowds are at some of their largest numbers, and if it was like it was the day I was at this park, it is unseasonably cold, with many large coats that were not normally present for this warm weather locale. More than one food item was snuck in under the cover of a Columbia jacket, what else could have been?
• Tabletop an attack on the animals or by the animals. We learned with the Cincinnati Zoo’s gorilla Harambe, that people have a strong attraction to animals, and at many attractions park goers have access that is very up close and personal to the animals in captivity or in use. Discuss the repercussions of a deliberate poisoning or physical attack on one of the animals. A contrasting exercise is an animal injures or kills employee or guest. Imagine the story if the Gorilla had killed the young child with cameras rolling.
If we acknowledge we live in a dangerous world, and
we know that the threats are always changing, we owe it to our customers to provide as safe and as prepared a destination as we can. When was the last time you stood in line at your own venue, or sat in the seats for a show, and thought ‘what if’?
Marc Burdiss MEP, CEM, M.Ed Marc Burdiss serves as the President of Preparedness Solutions, Inc. where he helps government agencies and companies prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies and disasters. Marc is a nationally recognised leader on emergency management exercises, and frequently writes extensively on the topics of emergency management, emergency operation centers, and preparedness exercises. He is a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM) and a FEMA Master Exercise Practitioner (MEP).
70 SEPTEMBER 2017 “ When
was the last time you stood in line at your own venue, or sat in the seats for a show, and thought 'what if'?
“
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108
