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

PART II

General Planning and Preparedness Efforts

Planning and preparing for the safety and security efforts at a major event is a daunting undertaking. The level of difficulty, both practically and psychologically, has been heightened by the addition of worries about CBRN/HAZMAT. The CBRN/HAZMAT threat crosses traditional response boundaries, brings different operational philosophies into potential conflict, and adds whole new dimensions and layers of complexity to planning, preparedness, and response.

For the planner or official who is not well versed in CBRN/HAZMAT, many of the concepts involved can be frightening, difficult, or just hard to understand. Sometimes this makes CBRN/HAZMAT into an underresourced or ignored backwater of the planning effort. I have seen events where the main planning effort pushed CBRN/HAZMAT into the “too hard to do” category. In the worst instances, big mistakes have been made, for which no penalty has yet been assessed because the world has not had a large CBRN/HAZMAT incident at a major event.

For the CBRN/HAZMAT specialist, the issue is often not a matter of knowing what to do. Rather, it is finding a way to be able to actually do the right thing in a complex organizational and bureaucratic environment. Large events seem to grow their own large and lengthy planning efforts. The CBRN/HAZMAT specialist needs to understand the “sea in which he swims” in order to ensure that his technical knowledge, often desperately needed, gets translated into ...