Preparation, knowledge key to special-event safety, experts say

Not even a decade ago, preparing for a crowded festival or parade was a fairly simple routine, says Tom Sampson, chief of the Calgary Emergency Management Agency.

Fast forward to 2018, and maintaining the safety of thousands at events such as the Calgary Stampede or an outdoor music festival requires a far more advanced, everchanging strategy.

“We have some cameras. We have aerial surveillance. We have a bunch of pieces in place. There’s a lot more there than you see,” Sampson said. “Five, 10 years ago, we really just thought about the volume of people. How do we feed them, how do we keep them cool if it’s hot, those sorts of things.”

This evolving approach is fitting for an era when threats, such as terror attacks, continue to occur. On Wednesday, emergency and law enforcement agencies from across southern Alberta met in Okotoks to discuss and learn from one another about strategies to mitigate risks at special events.

In August, a shooting killed close to 60 people at an outdoor festival in Las Vegas. The Sept. 30 attack in Edmonton following a CFL game injured five people, including a police officer who was rammed and stabbed by the driver of a truck.

Staff Sgt. Troy Carriere leads disaster, emergency operations and planning for the Edmonton Police Service. He said the force’s preparation is what made its response a success, resulting in the arrest of suspect Abdulahi Hasan Sharif.

“In these communities, sometimes you think maybe it won’t happen to you, but complacency can really hurt your plans if you aren’t always evaluating, trying to upgrade, trying to learn,” said Carriere, a keynote speaker at Wednesday’s conference.

Learning from past incidents has been key for Insp. Murray Knowles of the Ottawa Police Service, who served as the lead planner for security operations at more than 1,200 Canada 150 events last year.

Knowles was also the incident commander on the ground during the 2014 Parliament Hill shooting that killed Cpl. Nathan Cirillo.

“There was upwards of 22 lessons learned that we went through in our debriefing that were in our power to change,” said Knowles, another keynote speaker.

He pointed to issues that arose in the 2014 incident such as selfdeployment — off-duty police officers joining in the search for an active shooter without Knowles’ knowledge — and skewed perceptions leading to miscommunications about false threats.

“We chased unicorns for about four hours. There was over 100 calls that came in,” he said. “Seasoned police officers would tell me that they were being shot at when I first arrived there. Nobody had been shot at. We had the public seeing things, they were interpreting things as potential terrorist acts. Really, it’s just somebody standing, waiting for a bus.”

For New Year’s festivities at Parliament Hill, heavy construction vehicles were used as barricades to prevent cars from ramming people.

Sampson said the Calgary Emergency Management Agency continues to work with organizers of large-scale events, including the Calgary Stampede, which last year ramped up its entrance security, to limit potential threats.

“I don’t think Edmonton surprised us terribly. What Edmonton reminded us, and frankly, the folks that I work with, is that we’re all vulnerable to this kind of thing,” he said. “Our whole job is to reduce that vulnerability.”