No Upset Here
With no particular allegiance to either the Patriots or the Giants, I watched Super Bowl XLII. I did so after a year of weekly updates on the Glendale (Ariz.) Fire Department’s four years of planning for the game from Asst. Chief Tom Shannon, who also wrote our January cover story.
Immediately after Glendale was awarded the game, Fire Chief Mark Burdick established a planning team to create a comprehensive fire service strategy for the game and all sanctioned events in surrounding communities. The plan established working groups of surrounding cities, and county and state agencies to plan and provide support services for the entire valley.
This plan needed public safety, public health, public works, transportation and environmental agencies within the region to partner for effective communications.
Did it work? According to FIRE CHIEF Associate Publisher Greg Toritto and West Coast Sales Manager Andy Van Sciver, who were onsite for the event, Glendale‘s game plan set a new precedent for safety and security support.
“The challenges that the public-safety sector was facing were amazing,” Toritto said. “Going forward, there are huge challenges for future cities of Super Bowls and similar large-scale events.”
Toritto and Van Sciver were invited to participate in the Public Safety External Liaison Group, which included representatives for the next three Super Bowl cities: Tampa, Fla.; Miami; and Arlington, Texas.
“Every fire department in the country could learn from Glendale‘s approach and its use of a unified command system for this type of event,” Toritto said. “All the agencies involved worked together — and with the public — and were on the same page. All the agencies worked as peers and left their egos aside.”
“… Incident Command was clearly unified and spelled out,” added Van Sciver, who also is an officer on the Ventura County (Calif.) Search and Rescue–Upper Ojai Team. “Area command was very important. Eyes on the actual event in any given location reported up to the local emergency operations center and were monitored by the joint-operation command.”
For medical emergencies, first-aid teams roamed the area with EMS backpacks with ALS capabilities. Two ALS mini ambulances also were staged. Small John Deere Gators with slip-on suppression systems were available for first response.
Glendale will share its lessons learned in an upcoming issue of FIRE CHIEF.
“The cooperation between all of these departments and the willingness — starting at the top — to share control and take care of their assigned responsibilities was very impressive,” said Toritto. “Continuously, the message was that it was everyone working together.”
A great deal of time, effort and money was put into planning for the what-ifs. Thankfully, they didn‘t come last Sunday, but there are always lessons to be learned by every first responder from every size department — from what goes wrong and what goes right.
