Safely Does It

By Mark Breen

The World is a Strange Place

As an immediate side-note, on looking through my previous columns in this magazine, I noted that the last column I wrote began with the words ‘The world is an evil place’. Good to know I’m as consistent as the world is both evil and strange.

I’m going to be brutally honest here – I have ZERO idea what the Event Industry we all love so much is going to look like ‘after’ COVID-19. I can make reasonably educated inferences from what we know and what we are seeing but nobody knows what our industry will look and feel like in 12, 18, 24, 48 months.

Personally, I’ll just be happy to be still working in it and helping keep people safe while they enjoy themselves.

The ‘New Normal’

What I am confident enough in saying is that it’s likely we will be back running events, albeit with some changes and precautions, before we are all vaccinated against COVID-19 and effectively have it in our collective rear-view mirrors.

That being the case, I wanted to use this column to look at something I haven’t seen too many industry colleagues looking at so far – the Build and Break periods of events when we get back to running them.

Most of us (quite understandably) are thinking about the event itself. We’re trying to work out how our events can work. Just this week, here in Ireland, we’ve had the organisers of Europe’s Largest Outdoor Event, the National Ploughing Championships, state categorically that there is no way they can enforce ‘social distancing’ / ‘physical distancing’ at their event, with 70,000 people a day in attendance.

I want to look at the Build and Break and look at what I think should be our Core Principles in planning our event work sites, considering the COVID-19 risk.

Some Context

I’m not some outlier genius. Here in Safe Events we have been considering this largely as we’ve been working with the Irish Government to develop Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and Risk Assessments for temporary infrastructure builds during the height of the COVID-19 restrictions here in Ireland. Temporary hospital facilities, drive-through testing centres, media-relations centres, Command and Control Centres etc.

A Little Disclaimer

From the jump, these are not all necessarily applicable to all events. We all still need to do our event-specific Risk Assessments to help us establish what precautions we need to take.

With that in mind, I’ve sought to keep this as helpful and generic as possible in the hope that it serves to prompt you to consider certain things. You might quickly decide they are not applicable to your event or an issue for you and that’s just fine.

It’s also all based on what we currently know about COVID-19. I fully accept that the strange world may well have gotten stranger by the time you’re reading this. Hopefully not, though.

Core Principles

I’ve put together 5 Core Principles I feel should guide your development of procedures for your event site. They are:

1. Minimisation of the total number of supplier / contractor personnel on site simultaneously.

2. Strict adherence to ‘social distancing’ / ‘physical distancing’ guidelines between individual contractor teams on site.

3. Strict adherence to ‘social distancing’ / ‘physical distancing’ guidelines within individual contractors’ teams in as much as reasonably practicable on site.

4. Implementation on site of recommended hand-washing and hand-sanitising measures.

5. Continued implementation of established Health & Safety provisions of individual contractors’ own SOPs for their respective activities.

A Key Consideration

I believe point number 5 should be of particular interest. For me, there is an inherent risk in dealing with something like COVID-19 that we will become overly-focused on COVID-19. We have seen this happen with vehicle-as-a-weapon (VAW) attacks here in Europe, resulting in Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (HVM) being positioned in some inexplicable locations.

By way of illustration, a lighting supplier with a Method Statement outlining that hanging certain equipment at height is a two-person operation, should ensure it remains a two-person operation. There is no scope for the exact same operation to suddenly become a one-person operation, simply so that people are not within the 2 metre distancing guidelines.

The Bottom Line

Our Risk Assessments and Method Statements (RAMS) need to be adapted and augmented to appropriately account for the risks posed by COVID-19 but they should not be compromised because of COVID-19.

It’s important that we maintain focussed on ALL the risks inherent in planning and managing our event site and not just the most obvious one – even if that obvious one IS a global pandemic.

#EventInsight Webinar Series

We are launching a series of webinars where subject-matter expert Event Professionals introduce us to what they do and how they do it. The webinars will begin in May and likely run for a few months, based on the uptake we have had from experienced international colleagues looking to share their expertise. The Mailing List for the webinar series has over 500 people on it so far and you can join them at www.bit.ly/eventinsights

About the Author:

Mark Breen is Director of Safe Events as well as Cuckoo Events based in Dublin, Ireland. He is an award-winning event Safety Officer and one of the most experienced and qualified event & crowd safety practitioners in Ireland. He is a Specialist Member of IIRSM, as well as being a member of IOSH, EPS and ESA.

He writes and speaks regularly on all things event-related, particularly event & crowd safety. He is a Graduate Member of the Marketing Institute of Ireland and holds a Postgraduate Diploma in PR & Event Management. He is currently among a small class pursuing the world’s first MSc in Crowd Safety and Risk Analysis, and already has specialist qualifications in Spectator Safety Management and Crowd Science.

Mark and the Team at Safe Events and Cuckoo Events are passionate about helping people run safer events and devote a lot of time to doing so. Mark is very active on Twitter @ mark_breen, @SafeEventsIE and @CuckooEvents. The multiple award-winning Cuckoo Events website can be found at cuckoo.ie and the Safe Events website is at safeevents.ie.

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