NFPA Journal - July/August 2019 - 45

engineer the transition from "the
show must go on" to "life safety first."
We don't want only the risk manager
thinking about safety and everyone
else doing their own stuff.

Is that beginning to happen?
It's a process. There are some people
who have already understood that
taking the time to work safely is good
business. It saves lives, it saves dollars.
It makes people look upon your shows
favorably and yields fewer losses that
cause your insurance premiums to
go up. Safer is better in every way. It
also keeps the lawyers away from your
door, which is nice. There are certainly
people who get that. Having said that,
"the show must go on" is a longstanding tradition. It's going to take quite a
while for that habit to be broken. There
are still some pretty significant players in live event industry who prefer
not to think actively about safety. And
you know, they've had some fairly bad
losses and still they seem resistant.
Those of us who make up ESA ask and
urge and point out all the affirmative
reasons why safety is good business.
And every so often we remind them
that if they don't work safely, bad stuff
happens, and bad stuff is unpleasant as
well as expensive.

You said ESA is growing fast.
Why do you think so many
people are drawn to join?
Tragedy has made safety a bigger
issue, which is top of mind in a way
that a generation ago it wasn't. A
generation ago there certainly were
tragedies, like the crowd-crush
incidents at The Who concert in
Cincinnati in 1979 or the Hillsborough
Stadium soccer match in Sheffield,
England, in 1989. But we have more
of them today and there's more coverage of them, and consequently more
concern about them than ever before.
ESA was born in response to one of
those tragedies, and unfortunately the
beat has continued to go on. The news
provides a really compelling argument
for exactly what we're advocating.

What are the main safety
issues today keeping event
organizers up at night? How
are these concerns different
than, say, 50 years ago?
The obvious one is guns. We don't
have to sugarcoat that. The worst
active shooter incident in US history
was at a live event in Las Vegas, the

The prescriptions
to mitigate the risk of
active shooters don't
work especially well
at live events. The usual
instruction to run, hide,
fight has some real
problems when applied
to environments that
are dark, loud, and
unfamiliar, and where
a lot of people
might be impaired in
various ways.

Route 91 Harvest Festival. The previous worst active shooting incident in
US history was also at a live event, the
Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando,
Florida. The prescriptions to mitigate the risk of active shooters don't
work especially well at live events.
The usual instruction to run, hide,
fight has some real problems when
applied to environments that are dark,
loud, and unfamiliar, and where a lot
of people might be impaired in various ways.
Overseas where they don't have
America's gun issue, they have bombings in unmarked trucks and that's
obviously a significant concern. In
addition, organizers of outdoor events
have to worry about a severe weather
action plan and getting people out of
harm's way. We also have to devote
some serious thought to sexual
assault. The #MeToo movement applies
no less to live events than any place

else. Any of these, and frankly all of
them, should keep event organizers up
at night.

Why did ESA create a new
crowd management standard?
What gap in the safety matrix is
it intended to fill?
It's actually not just a gap, it's an
enormous chasm. There is no crowd
management standard, not in the US,
not globally. There just isn't one, which
is astonishing. ESA created a crowd
management task group to create this
standard because, even as we looked at
what we think are the most sophisticated approaches and ways of thinking
about crowd dynamics, we thought
something was missing.

What was missing?
My training as a lawyer has made me
very sensitive to what's called the legal
duty of care, which is that everyone
has a legal duty to behave reasonably under their circumstances. When
I look at a standard for events, I see
a good starting point. It's a guideline,
but is it a reasonable guideline under
the circumstances of a given show?
An example is crowd density, which is
always important, but it is relatively
less of a concern, or at least a different
concern, at a classical music concert as
opposed to a heavy metal show, where
the density is going to be higher and
the activity level within the crowd is
going to be much higher. It's not just a
matter of paying attention to the occupant load number, but also to what
activities people will engage in, what
the crowd's expectations are regarding
the event and their role in it, and what
activities are reasonably foreseeable.
Nuance like that is missing from the
guidance out there now.

Given that each event involves
such highly variable circumstances and seemingly requires
a lot of flexibility, how did you
go about crafting the standard?
ESA's draft crowd management standard is not a typical ANSI standard.
N F PA . O R G / J O U R N A L * NFPA JOURNAL

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NFPA Journal - July/August 2019

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