Organizations, venues get on board the EMSSI. By R.V. Baugus
Sometimes it just takes a car that mishandles a turn and smashes into your convention center’s front doors to make you realize that your venue is not impenetrable. If that can happen (and it does, as you are terrorist attack at a convention center? That question alone was enough to get the industry heavily involved
- model that is soon expected to be shared and used as protocol for the convention center world, a space where there are literally many doors - ver. “This is a great work in progress. Right now, the example I would use is that I have a foundation and maybe a couple of walls up and a roof but I’m not really sure at the end of the day what kind of house we’re building. Contractors Association] asked me to join this group [as a supporting was fascinating about how they were approaching security.” the framework for creating security guidelines for convention centers. security guidelines with federal programs and the Department of “The initiative has great potential,” Adams said. “We all talk about public assembly facilities being a prime target for someone to drive
20 Facility Manager Magazine
SAFETY & SECURITY INITIATIVE
EXHIBITIONS & MEETINGS
something into your building.” Adams speaks from personal experience about that very scenario, although fortunately in this case it was not intentional and did not involve terrorism. “We did actually have a car drive into our building,” he said. “It
front doors. It gets you thinking. You can look at these doors and think that there is some structure to them, but there’s really not much. So, we started rethinking this. It was at the same time the Paris attacks took place in November 2015. When Larry then approached me about this he was already front of mind with us. I thought, this makes a lot of sense to look at security at a deeper level.” security at convention centers to a deeper level never before experi- enced. As he pointed out, his colleagues, mostly in the stadium and arena sectors where professional teams play, are already mostly under a solid safety net. “The NBA, NFL, and MLB all have standards that facilities have to comply with,” he said. “They all only have one customer. In our case, in Colorado, we’re doing 75-80 citywide conventions that all have dif- ferent requirements. I think we will get there, but it’s going to take more of those brain cells that we have left to do this. “It makes a lot of sense to pull this whole thing together, though. I think it makes all the sense in the world. The security paradigm is really hard for most of us to swallow. It’s kind of like taking a dial-up modem, what it is, to Wi-Fi, where it needs to be.” Adams said some conventions that come to his venue bring their
own security team, especially those events with political or controver- sial speakers. For the most part, though, visiting shows hire locally. “Where they have to bring in their own people who, let’s be hon-
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