A blog by Roderick van Gelder
I’m very honoured to be presenting at the inaugural Venue Safety & Security Exchange on 12th-13th July in Sydney. I will be speaking on Wednesday 12th July about the use of the Swiss Cheese Model in Crowd Management. This approach came out of the Crowd Safety Summit Australia hosted by School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UNSW in May this year. In this blog, I will explain this model and will show how it can be used specifically for crowd management planning.
The concept behind the Swiss Cheese Model is that every hazard reduction system has its shortcomings, represented by the holes in Swiss cheese. Because each system has different holes of different sizes at different positions, a hole in one ‘slice’ can be covered by another ‘slice’ and prevent the failures that can occur in dealing with the safety of crowds.
Milad Haghani, the leading author of the paper, identifies five layers for the Crowd Safety Model:
- Policy and Legislation
- Planning
- Operational
- Community & Behavourial
- Incident response & impact mitigation.
In my presentation, I will focus on the second layer, Planning, and introduce another way of using the Swiss Cheese Model, specifically within the Crowd Science approach to crowd safety planning. I will explain the process structure of building a risk assessment report that will underpin the crowd management plan.
Identifying the layers in the plan
In the crowd management plan, the first layer will be the ‘type of event’. Concerts require a different approach from religious gatherings, protests a different approach from a street festival. And then within those broad descriptions, we look in further detail to the event type and site/ venue specifics. Simply put, you can’t use the André Rieu layer for a Slipknot concert even if they are in the same venue.
The next layer will be ‘demographics’. Understanding what the general age, gender and expectations are of the crowd. Is it a homogenic crowd with quite clear norms? Or is it a crowd with different, possibly conflicting norms and interests? In this layer, Haghani‘s point regarding education comes up, the matter in which they have had some form of education in recognizing risks and dealing with these risks. This layer will be closely linked to the next one, ‘design’. Understanding the demographics will aid in the design or layout of services, signage and facilities for the event. Families with small children have different requirements from people in their twenties.
As stated above, design looks at services and facilities required to keep the crowd happy and to improve the overall comfort level of the crowd. A happy crowd is an easy crowd to manage. And a well laid out site will improve the flow of people around the event venue. Adding extra bars to service a beer thirsty crowd (it takes longer to pour a beer than a glass of wine) calculating how long the queues may be and making sure you don’t obstruct the flow between the event and the toilets.
Then we look at ‘information’. What do people need to know when and how will we distribute that information? This is where age will play a big role: a younger crowd will want to find information on their devices where an older crowd will more rely on information given ahead of the event or on on-site signage. The size, consistency and positioning of signage has a huge impact on their effectiveness. Part of this slice is how information will be given to people not yet on-site during ingress, and how information is given in emergencies.
And finally, ‘management’. A large part of that will be staffing levels at different times, in different roles and different positions. Carefully understanding arrival patterns will help reducing queues by planning appropriate staff levels. But because we also need to look at budgets, we need to find the delicate balance between service and costs. Look at how we can move staff between positions to make the most efficient use of their skills.
The last three layers can then be reviewed against the three stages of an event: Ingress, Circulation and Egress.
Are you interested to find out more about the Swiss Cheese Model and Crowd Management Planning? Read the full paper or contact us.