09 Jul 015. 911! How to Handle Emergencies
AUDIO
Story: Ceiling falling in at hotel
Types of emergencies:
Natural Disasters
- Flood, fire, tornado, earthquake
- Natural disasters – Typically the venue will handle this. But you should stay involved. If guests are displaced, how are you moving them somewhere else? What are reimbursement policies?
Building Disasters
- Power outage, water leak, structural failure
Vendor Disasters
- Vendor, food failure, drink failure, service failure, rental delivery mixup, furniture failure, table, chair or stage or equipment collapses
- Tables – use locks on tables to prevent them from being moved around
- Where there is a vehicle in a room like a semi or a truck or car –
- Story of Truck in the room
- A lot of venues will say only a gallon of gas in a car. Or will require battery to be disconnected. May need an alternative way to power lights on a car if you want them on.
Guest Disasters
- Trip and fall, health issue, heart attack, sickness, drunk guests, angry guests
- Unruly guests – drunk fights
- Story: Person getting caught having an affair in the middle of an event
9 Tips for preparing for and handling emergencies
- Planning for an emergencies starts with the initial site visit. How do we mitigate damage? Ask what if questions like: What happens in case of bad weather or riots or COVID or… Who makes announcements?
- Alert authorities how many people are in a building any time there is a large number of people in a building and bad weather is on the way.
- Keep contact information for guests somewhere off site.
- Constantly keep running in the back of your mind what happens if
- Where is the risk? How do I mitigate it?
- Someone doesn’t show up – have a backup
- Someone gets sick or has a heart attack – identify medical personel at the event
- Someone odd shows up – security
- Who is in charge if something happens? Who contacts 911?
- If you run out of food, how do you communicate that?
- What if a stalker shows up? What do you do? You can uninvite him and escort him out. Can’t arrest him
- Try to take attention away from the disaster (unless it’s a natural disaster)
- Be part of the process, part of the solution, maintain communication with the client. Become a trusted part of the team so they are including you in the issue so you can be part of the solution.
- Story: Hotel didn’t tell us they ran out of food so we couldn’t help solve it
- If high profile person, we always have security. We will sometimes have undercover security at events.
- Understand client concerns of potential threats. Be sure you know them. Get pictures of them. Be aware. Do your research.
- Do a safety walk looking for hazards. Like trip hazards –
- What about cancelling an event?
- What do you have in place for communication?
- Refund when you can
- Be generous
- Allow transferring to the next event
- Because we don’t want the disaster to transfer to the next event
- Wedding disasters:
- What happens if someone backs out of a wedding?
- What advice do you give to the mother or father of the bride
- Story: Bride showing up without their wedding dress