When Poor Management Decision Making on Music Festival Sites Creates Safety Risks.

All music festival sites contain multiple risks to safety and if these are not managed correctly, they can lead to serious injuries and financial loss. What are the key causes of poor management decision making that increase safety risks, how can they be recognised and what steps can organisers take to mitigate them.

Safety incidents at music festivals continue to be an issue despite published recommendations after documented incidents at festivals in the past. Typical threats can come from extreme weather, equipment failure, overcrowding and other unexpected emergencies. A decision-making culture that manages such incidents to prevent them escalating needs to be established by the organising entity. Festival directors and operations managers are under pressure to deliver commercial objectives, but this should not detract from ensuring the safety of everyone on a festival site.

Time Pressure Shortcuts.
The critical path implementation of getting a music festival ready for the planned live dates can put enormous pressure on organisers to ensure that everything is ready for opening as advertised. Just a small slip in delivery schedules of crucial site build elements can impact on completing the site in time. The consequence of these time pressures can lead to rushed or missed safety inspections or work being completed without adequate supervision. The potential consequences of this can be structural failures, electrical hazards, falling equipment and unsafe working conditions. When timescales get squeezed the decision-making process can get fragmented and communication channels can breakdown.

Budget Cuts.
All festival entities work to a budget, and the planning phase usually allocates sufficient funds for every operational aspect of the event. If there are insufficient contingency budgets and some areas experience an overspend it can mean that budgets need to be cut elsewhere. Organisers may cut budgets form aspects they consider a low priority like security personnel, medical facilities and experienced operational staff, for example. This can expose the festival to critical operational gaps where queues become unmanageable, medical assistance is delayed along with poor incident detection and inadequate emergency responses.

Poor Planning.
If the planning process is poor, it can impact on numerous safety aspects of a festival particularly if clear decision-making responsibilities are not documented and there is no escalation procedure defined. Accurate forecasting for ticket sales and matching the number of festival-goers to capacities is essential and if not well managed can lead to overcrowding, which is one of the biggest safety threats for outdoor live events. Even if the number if festival-goers is within capacity limits a poorly designed site can lead to restricted walkways, chokepoints and inadequate emergency access routes.

Ignoring Warnings.
During the live event dates, it is essential that operational teams are constantly vigilant and aware of any pending emergencies. Poor management decision making can lead to simply monitoring deteriorating conditions on a site rather than taking action. Thiis could typically include high winds, flooding, fire risks or failing infrastructure, all of which can quickly develop from minor hazards into major incidents. Operational managers working out of a central control room may be too remote to fully understand the severity of a developing safety risk and it is not unusual for them to ignore warnings from front line staff working on another part of a site. Security staff, volunteers and medial teams may recognise hazards before the senior management does, even dismissing concerns in extreme cases.

The Show Must Go On.
Some of the most disturbing incidents in recent music festival history have been caused or made worse by senior festival management refusing to halt performances. A festival or operations director is under enormous commercial pressure to ensure that headline artists produce a great performance to satisfy festival-goers and sponsors. This can make them reluctant to halt a performance in deteriorating circumstances because they believe the schedule must continue to avoid potential financial loss. Building in robust safety reporting escalation processes can ensure that if frontline staff believe there is a threat to life, they can escalate information rapidly up to key decision makers to halt or pause a performance. This is often referred to as a show-stop procedure and is an operational safeguard that all staff must understand, making them safe in the knowledge that safety concerns will be acted on. Clear communication channels and escalation procedures ensure that the appropriate action can be taken with security staff, crowd control marshals, medical resources and artists being made fully aware of developing risks. Clear communication with audiences is essential to prevent panic and ensure that any evacuation is carried out in a calm and orderly fashion.

For festival organisers planning their next event using a software management platform like Festival Pro gives them all the functionality they need manage every aspect of their event logistics. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The Festival Pro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features with specific modules for managing artists, contractors, venues/stages, vendors, volunteers, sponsors, guestlists, ticketing, site planning, cashless payments and contactless ordering.

Image by Maor Attias via Pexels

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