CBRN and Hazmat Incidents at Major Public Events: Planning and Response

CHAPTER 3

CBRN in Context: Interagency Planning and Cooperation

Planning and preparation are necessary for success. You would not be reading this book if you thought otherwise. Most major events will be awash in planning efforts months and years ahead of the event. This can be both good and bad. I have seen major events that spawned a series of committees, task forces, working groups, subcommittees, and ad-hoc partnerships more than a year in advance of the event, each in turn having meetings, building large binders full of documents, and generally keeping the PowerPoint gods happy with sacrifices. It is hard to assess how well a large and cumbersome bureaucratic planning process has actually been in preparing for health, safety, and security at major events. This is not a textbook on organizational dynamics, so this is not really the place to debate the point. We must take it as a matter of established fact that most major events will have a bureaucracy associated with them. The successful implementation of CBRN/ HAZMAT response plans will depend in large part on surviving the bureaucracy.

SWIMMING IN THE SEA: KEEPING CBRN/HAZMAT IN CONTEXT

CBRN and HAZMAT, while important to us, are well down on the list of planning concerns for the upper management. Safety and security, while certainly not ignored, are one of at least a dozen planning areas for the overall management of the event. Housing, transport, catering, architecture, water, electricity, media, sales of tickets, and many ...