Briefly Covering a Stadium Emergency

For the purpose of this post, the event that leads to the emergency will not be detailed. We’ll just say that a bomb went off under the East stands causing the collapse of the Press Box and Upper section of the stands between the 35 yard lines. This collapse makes most of the stairways and walkways on the East side inaccessible along with gates B and C.

Hysteria

Something that goes hand in hand with an event like this is panic. People will not be thinking clearly, some may be injured, and some will faint. The obstacles created my the collapse of the stadium have made the East side of the stadium impassable and exit from that side impossible. So, the 70,000+ survivors will be evacuating through 2 of the 4 gates. In stadium tragedies, more deaths have been caused by trampling than all other means combined. Because of this, I have to believe that a certain amount of trampling will happen. Bottlenecks will be more prevalent than ever as the upper decks rush to leave the stadium.

Communications

As any Penn State fan who has been to a game knows, cell phones during an average game have well below average performance. During Ohio State, text messaging and calling was basically an impossibility. This raises concern for their use during an event like this. Odds are, cell phones would be completely useless. What makes this issue even bigger is that when I had around 20 people fill out the questionnaire for what they would do in case of an emergency, they all put that a cell phone would be their means of communication. A cell phone, in this case, would be a false sense of security. In this case, a walkie talkie with all members of your group tuned into the same station may be the only way of having even a small amount of communication.

Aftermath

If 50,000 people died in the attack, repercussions would be severe. Because of where the attack occured, student death would be minimal (say, 5,000-7,500). While this is a lot of students (The most students that would ever have been killed in any event), an attack on the South End zone would have killed more like 15,000-20,000. Regardless, the remainder of the semester would likely be canceled, and attendance at Penn State the college would inevitably drop. “Consumer” confidence would drop to an all-time low for the college. This would bring significant economic consequences that may lead to big changes for the college. Reconstruction of Beaver Stadium wold be a multi-million dollar excursion, also. Most likely, it would never reach the capacity it was at before the event. No one could say what would happen to the football team, would the season be postponed or canceled (for Penn State, not the whole NCAA) and what happens to the millions of dollars in tickets already sold. Basically, the consequences are large and wide reaching.

Research: Why should we look at this?

We are trying to create scenarios like this one for every type of attack possible on the stadium, from a blizzard to an Anthrax attack to an attack like 9/11. The book used for our SRA 211 class, The Department of Homeland Security: An Overview, goes over some examples just like this one, except they specify the attack and who it came from. Doing scenarios like this help us to further understand how an evacuation needs to be performed. Also, it allows us work out contingency plans, which our vital to the future of not only Penn State, but America itself. Currently, less than 5 percent of all businesses have a contingency plan, which is an issue all on its own. These plans lay out what happens in case any type of event threatens the business’s future.

How to stop it

Once the attack happens, there is really nothing that can be done other than affectively evacuating survivors and continuing the processes of whatever was attacked. The steps that are needed to be taken to stop this scenario come prior to the execution of the plan. The perpetrators need to be arrested or foiled before they can: cross the border, purchase explosives, or enter the stadium. Stadium security at college games needs to be stepped up to pro football level. In the pros (as laid out in a response to Steve’s comment on the post, Profiling Penn State Fans), every person is patted down and males must go through a separate line as females so that no person is patted down by the opposite sex. Currently, all bags are checked upon entrance, but that is not enough. What it comes down to is that good security is the only way to prevent a scenario such as this.