Emergency response agencies braced for Ironman
The Ironman 70.3 World Championships are finally here, but local, state and federal emergency response agencies have been cooking up event plans for almost two years.
The championships are a huge lift for the agencies working on the front lines to ensure the safety of thousands of people who have flooded into the city to compete or watch, and on
Friday morning, those agencies met in one room to go over final preparations.
“It’s absolutely a priority for Ironman that we’re safe,” said Diana Bertsch, vice president of the Ironman World Championship event.
“Two years ago, we started working with the [Chattanooga Convention and Visitors Bureau] to make it possible to be here. Today, working with all the agencies in Chattanooga and all the surrounding counties, we’re in the final stages, just to make certain, that everything is in order before our events on Saturday and Sunday,” she said.
After handling the annual Riverbend festival and other large events, Chattanooga authorities are confident that the expected crowd of more than 10,000 spectators will enjoy the world championships safely with security elements, both seen and unseen, ensuring everyone is protected.
“You’ll see the same thing you see at all of our events,” said Lt. Austin Garrett of the Chattanooga Police Department. “You’ll see uniformed Chattanooga police officers, uniformed Hamilton County sheriff’s deputies, uniformed Tennessee Highway Patrol officers, Georgia State Patrol there to ensure both on the traffic side and on the event venue that it’s safe for the public.”
In addition to all of the officers on land and on the water, law enforcement agencies have taken a variety of other measures, including the placement of concrete road barriers around crowd areas.
“Those are vehicle intrusion countermeasures,” Garrett said. “We don’t want someone randomly driving into the event around a barricade, so those will be in place, and that’s to prevent someone [from] being run over by a vehicle.”
The police department began using staggered water barricades at the entrances to Riverbend two years ago, even before a string of terrorist attacks in Europe involving the use of cars and trucks to drive through crowds in London, Berlin and Nice, France.
Barricades were set up for the festival after the 2014 SXSW crash in Austin, Texas, in which a man drove a stolen car into a
crowd, killing four people.
The huge influx of people also will put a strain on local roadways, forcing dozens of road closures over the weekend as 4,500 competitors travel back and forth across the area.
“Our biggest challenge with an event this size, because it’s an international event, is the added traffic,” Garrett said. “We have detours established, and we tweak those from event to event … to ensure that we’re always improving.”
With so many extra cars on the road, Garrett’s primary concern is a familiar one to Chattanoogans.
“The biggest thing is watch
out for the cyclists,” he said. “The three-foot rule applies. Three foot rear, side and front, you know, give them their space.”
“They’re here to enjoy our city, and we want to give them that Southern hospitality and customer service that they’re here to experience,” he said.
The event has also brought in a few dignitaries from among the 91 countries represented by the competitors, although police could not confirm who those individuals are or where they’re from.
Garrett said police have been in communication with private security details tasked with
guarding those people, but local law enforcement won’t be dedicating resources to them.
“It adds into our planning, but just because they’re here, they don’t get any different treatment than anyone else. Everyone has the same value within our community,” he said.
“If you’re from California and you work seven days a week and you do this as a hobby — versus someone who’s a dignitary — they’re not here on state business, they’re here for personal business, so they have their own details.”
In coordinating all of the moving parts around Ironman, Tony Reavley, director of Hamilton County’s Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, said it helps that Chattanooga has hosted other Ironman events and knows partially what to expect.
“Chattanooga and Hamilton County is the only city in the world in the history of Ironman that’s hosted four Ironman events in the same year,” he said. “It gives us face time and familiarity with everybody and everyone else’s capabilities and what we can do and the resources we can pull upon.”
But in the coming days, one of the largest problems may not be the event itself, but the potential logjam created by traffic leaving afterward.
Some authorities are concerned the mass exodus of residents fleeing north and west out of Hurricane Irma’s path and into regions near Chattanooga could exacerbate conditions. The hurricane is expected to make landfall in Florida on Saturday before sweeping northward.
“One of the things we’re having to look at down range is travel, because a lot of the folks will be going back home the first of the week, and that’s when we’re supposed to maybe be impacted by the storm,” Reavley said.
“We’ll be in constant contact with [the National Weather Service] just in case things happen — just in case Hurricane Irma decides she wants to change her route or something,” he said.
“We’re focused on the Ironman world championships, but we’re also looking at those other things out there that may or may not impact us.”