Control through comms
Large and high-profile events require a great deal of planning if the safety of
attendees and VIPs is to be guaranteed, and communications have a key role
to play. Sam Fenwick has the details
No-one expects to die at a music festival; yet on
24 July 2010, 21 people did – their ribcages
crushed from overcrowding. The incident took
place at the Love Parade festival in Duisburg,
North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany and
occurred thanks to a deadly combination of tight enclosed
surroundings, a T-junction, a sudden surge of people wanting
to reach the festival, and questionable crowd-control tactics.
Cameron O’Neill, Riedel Communications’ director –
APAC, says when people talk about critical comms in an
event context, they tend to “jump to presidential motorcades
and papal visits, but anything can become critical in minutes”.
“The thing that frustrates me the most is that
communications is not ‘sexy’,” he adds, “so it’s the last thing
on event organisers’ minds – they tend to focus on the stage,
the lights, video walls, subwoofers, catering, the talent. It’s
often only once they’ve blown their budget that they realise
they’ve got a lot of people they need to talk to each other and
they have no frequency plans and are stuck using licence-free
radios. While they have their place, if you allow yourself to
fall into that, you’re setting yourself up to fail; 99 times out of
100, you’ll be fine, but if something does go wrong, people
may die and your reputation will be in tatters.”
O’Neill says one of the first things to start looking at is
the fleet map – which sets out who needs to speak to whom.
Then it’s a case of looking at spectrum and frequencies.
Eric Davalo, head of strategic development at Secure Land
Communications at Airbus, adds that this is also important as
it helps get a sense of how much radio network capacity will
be required and the locations where it will be most required
when operational models are defined.
O’Neill explains that the most appropriate technology
varies from country to country, mainly due to spectrum
availability. For example, TETRA works well for events in
Germany, as spectrum is available and people are used to using
it, but over in Australia, 25KHz channels are hard to get, so
Riedel tends to opt for DMR. Similarly, he says: “In Japan
it’s very difficult to get anything done, transmission has to be
digital – if you want to use TETRA, you’re completely out of
luck. This is why early planning is critical.” He is working on
a bid for a project in Tokyo and “it was only when we went
in-depth” that these restrictions became clear. To him, this
highlights the importance of local intelligence – “sometimes
different regions in the same country have different
requirements”. O’Neill also highlights the influence of cultural
differences, which determine whether communication is a
free-for-all, structured/top-down, or somewhere in between.
For example, he’s heard that at some events in China, radios
may as well have been ‘one-way’ rather than two-way, as they
tended to be used by managers/supervisors to speak to their
workers and not the other way around.
O’Neill explains that the timescales and lead times vary
significantly depending on the scale of the event – for
example, communications for events on the scale of the
Olympic Games need to be arranged a year away from
the event (with planning beginning two to three years
14 www.criticalcomms.com November 2019
Adobe Stock/fotosr52
Events
The sheer size of
crowds at modern
events poses
challenges for
those tasked with
ensuring their
safety
/www.criticalcomms.com