When it comes to event organisers planning a safe and enjoyable event experience, several precautionary measures can be taken to prevent unnecessary injuries during the event. As an event organiser, it’s up to you to ensure the event goes off without a hitch.
We’re going to explore what you can do with crowd management and a variety of crowd control barriers to ensure the safety of all who have come to an event.
Crowd Management
As an event organiser, you must ensure the safety of all visitors to your event. While certain aspects of crowd safety can be left to contractors, it is your duty as the overall event organiser to ensure the safety of all crowds.
Hazards include tripping due to poor lighting or poorly maintained floors as well as the building up of rubbish, moving vehicles being made for sharing the same route as pedestrians, the collapse of a structure or fence which falls on the crowd, people being pushed onto objects, such stalls causing congestion during a busy period by being parked in the middle of a route for pedestrians, queueing at bars obstructing crowd movement, cross flows whenever people cut through crowds to get to places such as the toilet, failure of equipment like turnstiles, and sources of fire that might come from cooking equipment, electrical equipment and the like.
Assessing risk, putting controls into place.
Assessing risk arising from crowd movement as the people arrive, during the event, and when they leave. The circumstances will largely dictate whether routes that are going to and from the venue will fall under health and safety law, so you must consult with the proper authorities at all times when working on one of these events.
If crowd management health and safety does apply, then it is the organiser’s legal duty to ensure people’s safety on these routes, depending on their extent of control. Since this can change so quickly depending on the individual circumstances, this will be determined on a case by case basis. These duties will most likely be shared by various individuals about the event and the overall safety and security of said event.
Barriers at events will serve several purposes when it comes to ensuring the safety of crowds at events. Include managing and influencing the behaviour of the crowds, lining routes, preventing people from climbing on top of structures and potentially falling and injuring themselves, preventing overcrowding and relieving the actual buildup of an audience’s pressure, to provide security, such as with an outdoor fence, and to help shield people from hazards.
If you decide to use barriers, they should all be assessed for risk. This will help prevent the potential danger of having unsafe barriers put in place. The last thing we want as event organisers is to put a system into place, only for that system to break down and cause undue harm to any individuals at the event.
Depending on the nature of the risk factor when it comes to the barriers, you may need competent advice to aid you in setting this risk back in order. This could be done in many ways, including consulting with experts in the field who will better understand the risks than you might have.
The factors you need to take into account include the planned use of barriers, the layout of the event, conditions on the ground as well as the topography of the event area, underground services such as water pipes and electric cables that could prevent or else restrict the use of pins to secure the barriers, the weather that you’re dealing with on that day, the load that’s being put on the barrier, including wind and crowd pressure, and audience numbers and overall behaviour.
Installing simple barriers like a rope and posts could be managed in-house, choosing more complex fencing barriers, such as for the protection of the stage area, is much more complex and requires the help of a trained and professional contractor.
Deployment of barriers with properly trained stewards will ensure the overall success of your crowd management strategy.
Stage barriers.
Stage barriers are used in stage settings and settings where there is a heavy crowd build-up, such as bars or similar locations, where there’s expected to be a great crowd density.
Stage barriers are commonly built around a basic A-frame that is meant to be load-bearing. This means that the more the crowd pushes against the barrier, the more it can hold and contain the crowd. This allows for the control of crowd behaviour from an elemental level that considers crowd location and the direction of crowd movement. Focusing on these things will ensure both the crowd’s safety and the barrier will stand up to the crowd. Both situations are inherently necessary for the safe and productive success of the program.
Design features.
Most stage barriers are made of steel or aluminium and fully welded. They shouldn’t be welded in parts, nor should they consist of soft materials, which will compromise the structural integrity of the barrier and make for an inefficient and unsafe barrier system for the populace at large.
The stage barrier will also have a footplate that the audience stands on. It seems counterintuitive to have the audience standing on the very barriers that are meant to keep them safe, but this actually helps stabilise the overall system.
It will also have a top horizontal rail that is rounded, smooth, and aligned flush with the vertical front fascia on the side of the audience. This will ensure that the audience can’t climb over the barrier and will allow the barrier not to impede the actual experience of the concert or whatever other event might be happening at the time.
The barrier should also have a step on the side of the stage so that personnel can offer water to the people in the audience or grab people from the audience.
A stage barrier is only as strong as its weakest link, so you must be sure that all systems put into place with the stage barrier are strong and effectively constructed. The joining systems put into place with the stage barrier will be the weakest link by far, so you must ensure that all bolts are secured effectively and efficiently.
The barrier should have smooth lines, no rust or other type of disfigurement, all of its rivets in place and not rotating, very smooth welds without any type of fracture, be stable, with all bolts correctly placed and no chance of entrapment present, and no type of access gate on the sections that are pressured.
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