Chapter 6 Crowd Planning and Preparation

Abstract

This chapter reviews planning methods and practices. Significant work has been published and used for long periods on planning methods. Preplanning is essential due to the life safety factors that a crowd can develop in situ. Planning can be considered in two phases. Information and background planning essential to communicate facts and identify risk areas in crowd management and operational planning. This then provides resourcing and contingency planning once the operation is in place. Like military operations both phases are important, however in many crowd situations operational and contingency planning is given less scrutiny. This is because the plans are normally scrutinised by authorities, councils, government, venue or land owners and they are more comfortable with pre-information type plans that inform them of the context background and communication flows. How the crowds are managed by security contractors is not usually an area they are experienced in, hence less attention is paid to these areas. The aim of this chapter is to provide enough knowledge for all event stakeholders to review and discuss practical implementation issues in security deployment and control. Planning and preparation requires an increased focus for crowd management because the emerging behaviour from the collective requires more options to be considered and prepared for. As crowds can cause life safety issues and because agents and systems can interact to exaggerate interactions and responses quickly, preparation and contingency planning is vital. Crowd risk assessments have to be conducted to understand and communicate the magnitude of the problems that can occur. If the consequences of the crowd activity are significant to the risk appetite of the organiser then response methods and measures should be developed and implemented. An example of this would be preparing additional signage, barriers and guards to divert pedestrians away or around potential bottlenecks when the flow becomes too congested.