When the unexpected strikes at a festival, preparation makes all the difference. No matter how well-prepared an event team thinks they are, it’s critical to plan and rehearse for unexpected and dangerous situations (crowdsafetytraining.com). In fact, having well-practiced contingency plans can mean the difference between order and chaos if an emergency hits (tseentertainment.com). For large-scale festivals that host tens of thousands of attendees (and even for smaller boutique events), training your staff through drills, simulations, and tabletop exercises is an essential investment in safety.
Seasoned festival organisers around the world treat emergency preparedness rehearsals as non-negotiable. They know that when a sudden thunderstorm, safety threat, or missing child scenario unfolds, everything runs smoother if the team has “seen” it before in training. This article shares comprehensive advice on conducting effective training, drills, and table-top exercises for festival emergencies. It draws on real festival case studies—from massive international music events to local community festivals—to illustrate how practicing for worst-case scenarios can save lives, preserve your event’s reputation, and reveal critical gaps before they become failures on show day.
Rehearsing Critical Scenarios: Weather, Evacuations, and Missing Children
Identify and practice for your highest-risk scenarios. Every festival’s risk profile is a bit different, but certain emergencies are universal. Active shooters, terrorism, structural collapses, medical emergencies, severe weather, and lost children or vulnerable adults are examples of situations any large event team may face (crowdsafetytraining.com). Among these, weather incidents, full or partial evacuations, and missing-child situations are some of the most common crises that festival producers must be ready for. By rehearsing these scenarios in advance, your staff will know exactly how to react under pressure.
Weather Holds and Shelter-in-Place Drills
Outdoor festivals live at the mercy of Mother Nature, so weather-related drills are paramount. If lightning, high winds, or extreme weather threaten your event, you may need to hold (pause) performances or ask attendees to shelter in place. Practice how you would make that call and communicate it:
– Chain of Command: Determine who monitors weather data (many events have a dedicated weather officer or use alert apps) and who has authority to order a show stop or site evacuation. Ensure this decision chain is clear and drilled, so no one hesitates when seconds count.
– Stage and Site Protocol: Rehearse stopping a performance mid-act. For example, simulate a scenario where lightning is detected 8 miles away. Does the stage manager know how to safely power down equipment? Have MCs or DJs ready scripted announcements to calm the crowd and inform them of the hold.
– Attendee Communication: Use every channel to notify festival-goers. In drills, test your public address system, video boards, and mobile app push notifications. Large festivals like Lollapalooza in Chicago have refined this to an art – they blast safety messages on jumbotrons and stage PAs, and even send push alerts through the festival app directing fans to shelter (weather.com). In a 2015 severe storm emergency, Lollapalooza’s organizers evacuated over 48,000 attendees (plus 4,500 staff) in an orderly fashion by using every communication channel – from jumbotron alerts and stage announcements (even artists helped tell fans to seek shelter) to push notifications and a special emergency webpage with shelter maps. The operation worked: the crowd moved to safety, and the festival was able to resume within an hour once the storm passed (weather.com) (weather.com).
– Shelter Plans: Identify where people should go if they must shelter on-site (e.g. sturdy buildings, vehicles, barns on a farm venue, or even designated open areas away from structures). In your drill, have teams guide a hypothetical crowd to these refuges. This might involve coordinating with venue owners or local authorities – for instance, some city festivals pre-arrange access to parking garages or nearby arenas as emergency shelters.
– “All Clear” and Resume: Don’t forget to practice the restart. After a weather hold, how will you signal it’s safe to continue? Practice the process for re-inspecting stages for safety (after wind especially), communicating the all-clear to staff, and getting the schedule back on track. Having a tested procedure for this ensures you can recover smoothly from a pause, as Lollapalooza did by resuming shows promptly once conditions improved (weather.com).
These weather drills should be done pre-event (perhaps a week or two before) and refreshed if new staff or volunteers join late. They build muscle memory so that when dark clouds gather and winds pick up, your whole team responds like second nature instead of scrambling. History has shown that failing to plan for severe weather can be disastrous – for example, the Indiana State Fair’s stage collapse in 2011, caused by a sudden wind gust, tragically demonstrated how deadly a storm can be when proper holds or evacuations aren’t executed in time (tseentertainment.com). In contrast, festivals that do plan and rehearse weather protocols tend to manage such scares in stride, putting attendee safety first and preventing panic.
Full and Partial Evacuation Drills
Perhaps the most challenging scenario to practice is a site evacuation – clearing part or all of your festival venue due to an emergency. It could be prompted by severe weather, a wildfire approaching, a bomb threat, or any situation that makes the grounds unsafe. The key to an effective evacuation is crowd communication and inter-agency coordination, which absolutely benefits from rehearsal:
– Evacuation Plan: Long before gates open, draft a detailed evacuation plan covering routes, exits, and off-site assembly or shelter areas. For large-scale festivals, work with crowd management specialists to calculate how to move the maximum crowd quickly without bottlenecks. Identify who gives the evacuation order and how it’s communicated event-wide.
– Practice Communication: In a drill, simulate how you’d tell a crowd of thousands to leave the site calmly. Use stage microphones, emergency alerts, and staff with megaphones. For example, after a real storm evacuation in 2012 that sent 100,000 people pouring onto city streets, Lollapalooza’s organizers learned the hard way that communication needed improvement. They subsequently added extensive video screen messaging, better acoustics for announcements, and an emergency notification webpage so that if an evacuation happens again, attendees get clear instructions on where to go (www.wbez.org) (www.wbez.org). Incorporate those tools into your own drills: physically test the volume and clarity of PA announcements and ensure signage is ready to deploy.
– Staff Roles and Muster Points: Everyone on the festival crew needs to know their specific role in an evacuation. In your rehearsal, assign teams to zones of the venue. Practice radio communications: who reports when a zone is clear? Do security teams sweep the area for stragglers? Identify muster points for staff after evacuating attendees, so you can account for your team’s safety as well. Cross-train employees on multiple roles in case your plan B needs extra hands.
– Controlled Urgency: Drills should teach staff how to project calm urgency. Panicked shouting can cause stampedes, but too relaxed a tone might not convey the seriousness. Train your MCs, stage managers, and security leads in phrasing evacuation messages that are firm yet reassuring. Use clear directives like “Please walk calmly to the nearest exit and seek shelter at location X” rather than inciting fear. Some festivals use code phrases (that staff understand but aren’t obvious to attendees) to initiate staff actions without alarming the crowd until announcements are ready – you can rehearse these coded signals too.
– Partial vs. Full Evacuation: Practicing a partial evacuation (e.g. just one stage area or one side of the venue) is as important as a full-site exit. There are times you might only need to clear a certain zone – for instance, if there’s a small fire or localised threat in one area. Table-top scenarios can walk through how to cordon off one part of the festival and safely guide people out of that section while the rest of the event continues. This requires marshals/security quickly setting up perimeters and communicating clearly to avoid confusion. By including partial scenarios in your drills, your team learns flexibility – not every incident will end the entire festival.
– Learn from Real Evacuations: It helps to study how others have handled it. For example, in 2015 and 2019, severe weather forced Tomorrowland in Belgium to delay or evacuate segments of the festival. Thanks to coordinated efforts with local authorities, they ushered crowds to shelters and restarted when feasible, preserving the event experience. And as mentioned, Chicago’s Lollapalooza 2015 was lauded as a textbook case: nearly 50,000 people were evacuated in under an hour due to nearby lightning, then allowed back in once the storm passed (weather.com) (weather.com). Such outcomes are only possible because the producers had a solid plan and practiced it. The time to discover flaws in your evacuation strategy is in a drill, not during the real thing.
After any evacuation exercise, always debrief (more on debriefing below) and update your plan with lessons learned. You might find, for instance, that an exit gate everyone assumed was sufficient gets jammed in the drill, indicating you’ll need additional egress or better traffic flow design. Or you might realize communication in one corner of the field was inaudible, prompting you to rent extra speakers or have staff with handheld radios in the crowd. These discoveries are gold – they allow you to fix issues proactively.
Missing-Child and Lost Person Scenarios
In the midst of festival chaos, especially at family-friendly events or those allowing under-18 attendees, lost child incidents will happen. Having a robust plan for missing children (or any vulnerable attendee separation) is vital for both safety and public trust. While a lost child scenario may not endanger the entire crowd like weather or a fire, it’s an emotional emergency that needs swift resolution. Rehearsing this scenario involves:
– Lost Child Protocol: Establish a clear protocol that any staff member can activate if a parent reports a missing child (or if staff find a lost kid). The protocol typically includes immediately alerting security and all radios with a description, and discreetly “locking down” exits to prevent an abduction scenario. Many festivals use code words for this – for example, some events might radio “Code Adam” (named after a US missing-child program) along with a description, rather than broadcasting “missing child” to attendees which could cause alarm or tip off a possible abductor.
– Drill the Response: Practice a missing child drill on-site with your team. One way is to have a staff member pretend to be a panicked parent reporting a lost child to the nearest crew member. Watch how the information flows: Did the staffer know whom to contact? Was venue security quick to respond to gates? Did the team efficiently sweep the common areas and quietly engage the crowd in looking (often staff may ask attendees in one area “Has anyone seen a child in a red shirt?” without causing panic)? Time the whole process from alert to child recovery. Strive to lower that time with each practice.
– Lost & Found Kids Centre: Almost all large festivals designate a “Lost Children” centre or reunification point, often staffed by welfare or volunteer teams specially trained in child comfort and safeguarding. Make sure every crew member and police officer on site knows where this point is. During drills, include a step for delivering the found child to the safe location. Festivals like Glastonbury and Reading in the UK, or Coachella in the US, all have welfare tents for this purpose – ensure your event has one and that it’s clearly marked on maps and signages.
– Parental Education: While not a direct part of staff training, it’s worth noting: the best festivals also educate parents upon entry about what to do if they get separated from their child (for instance, some events give kids wristbands with parent phone numbers, or have registration programs). Make sure your team knows these initiatives too. If you’ve encouraged parents to take a photo of their child that day to have a recent image on hand, work that idea into your drill (“Mom has a photo on her phone, share it to security now”). The more realistic the practice, the better. Remember, at any decent family-friendly festival, staff and stewards are expected to be fully trained to handle missing child situations, often resolving them so quickly that the child doesn’t even realise they were “missing” (www.festivalkidz.com). Your goal is to meet that standard through training.
– Broader Missing Persons: Beyond children, adapt the plan for any vulnerable person – it could be an adult with a cognitive disability who got separated from their caretaker, or even an intoxicated attendee who is reported missing by friends. Your missing-person protocol can cover those scenarios too (though the urgency might be highest with a small child, of course).
By rehearsing the lost child scenario, your staff will react calmly and effectively when an anxious parent comes to them for help. You build confidence in your team’s ability to reunite families – which not only avoids tragedy but also boosts public confidence in your festival’s safety.
Cross-Agency Tabletop Exercises: Unified Practice with Injects
Some emergency responses can’t be practiced fully with just your internal team – you need to involve external agencies like police, fire services, medical responders, and local authorities. This is where cross-agency tabletop exercises come in. A tabletop exercise is essentially a guided simulation on paper (or computer) where key stakeholders walk through a hypothetical incident step by step, discussing what each party would do. For large festivals, it’s common to do this annually or before each edition of the event:
– Bringing Everyone to the Table: Invite representatives from all relevant agencies to a table-top session – festival department heads, security contractor leads, police and fire commanders, ambulance service leads, venue owners, and even city emergency management officials if applicable. Together, you review the festival’s emergency action plans and then tackle a scenario. For example, Glastonbury Festival in the UK conducts a massive multi-agency tabletop exercise before each festival, bringing together emergency services and festival organisers to run through potential incidents (internationalfireandsafetyjournal.com). This ensures that everyone – from the local fire brigade to the event control room – shares a mental model of how to respond in unity.
– Using Injects to Simulate Surprises: In a well-run tabletop drill, the scenario unfolds gradually and facilitators introduce injects – sudden twists or new information – to test how participants adapt. An inject might be “10 minutes into the severe storm, an unrelated power outage occurs in Stage Two, worsening the situation” or “Mid-evacuation, a report of a missing 6-year-old comes in.” These injects force the team to think on their feet and handle multiple overlapping problems, just like real life. They help expose holes in coordination: maybe the police and festival security realise they were about to send conflicting instructions, or medical teams find their radio isn’t on the same channel as site operations. It’s much better to encounter those surprises in a conference room exercise than in front of a live crowd.
– Clarifying Roles and Communication: Use the tabletop to clarify who is in charge of what when an emergency happens. In many countries, a unified command system (sometimes the local police or a joint agency command) will take over if a major incident is declared. Your festival staff should know when to hand over control, and external agencies should understand the event layout and internal communication structure. Walking through scenarios, you might ask: “At what point do we call in mutual aid or ask the police to take charge? How do we communicate between the on-site command post and the city’s emergency ops center?” Answering these in a drill prevents deadly confusion later.
– Documenting the Outcomes: Table-top exercises should result in a list of action items. Maybe the fire department points out that an access road to the site wasn’t wide enough for engines – so you commit to widen it or station a smaller vehicle nearby. Or the ambulance service requests a better triage area layout. Treat the tabletop not as a test to “pass” but as a collaborative rehearsal that improves your plans. All participants should feel safe to honestly critique and suggest changes. The outcome is often updated contact lists, modified protocols, and a stronger multi-agency playbook for festival day.
– Real-World Camaraderie: There’s a subtle but powerful benefit to cross-agency drills: they build relationships. When your festival team and local responders have met and problem-solved together, they trust each other more. On the day of the event, if something goes wrong, those police officers and firefighters are not strangers – they know the event organisers by name and have aligned their strategies in advance. This sense of teamwork can hugely streamline real emergency responses.
In summary, a cross-agency tabletop with well-crafted injects is like a dress rehearsal for all involved players. It ensures that when the curtain rises on festival day and something goes awry, everyone from the security guards to the city paramedics performs in sync, following a script you’ve collectively written and revised.
Honest Debriefs and Continuous Improvement
Practice is only as good as the learning that comes from it. After every drill, exercise, or festival itself, conduct an honest debrief with your team and participating agencies. This is a no-blame, no-egos review of what happened, what went well, and what didn’t. Encourage everyone to speak up about gaps or confusion they experienced:
– Schedule Debriefs Immediately: Debrief while the memory is fresh – ideally the same day or within 24 hours of the exercise or incident. For multi-day festivals, you might even do quick end-of-day debriefs for any issues that arose, so you can adjust overnight.
– What to Cover: Go through the timeline of the scenario and examine each decision and outcome. Did all staff get the message to hold the show? Were the gates secured quickly? If something took too long or someone didn’t know what to do, dig into why. Sometimes a procedure was unclear or a person wasn’t trained on that aspect – this is valuable insight.
– Honesty Over Image: Leadership should set the tone that this is about improvement, not punishment. Festivals have a lot at stake with their image, and staff might feel pressure to gloss over mistakes. Break that barrier by maybe starting with a personal observation like, “I felt our communications got muddled during the drill and I want us to figure out how to fix that.” When team members see bosses acknowledging issues, they’ll be more forthcoming too.
– Document and Update Playbooks: Write down the key findings and assign actions. If volunteers at the info tent never got the evacuation notice during the drill, you might decide to equip them with radios or include them on a text alert system. If the tabletop revealed that the medical team didn’t know the nearest hospital route, update the orientation training to cover that. Modern festivals often maintain playbooks or emergency manuals – living documents that outline all procedures. Keep these updated religiously. After each debrief, incorporate the improvements: better signage, refined checklists, clarified role descriptions, etc. Over successive events, these playbooks become incredibly robust.
– Learn from Near-Misses and Failures: If an actual incident happened (even a minor one), treat it as a learning exercise too. Some festivals formalise this by holding a big post-event debrief meeting with all agencies and key staff. For example, after festival season, city officials in some locales meet with event organisers to review what could be done better next time. Adopt that mindset of continuous improvement. A festival that had a scare with, say, overcrowding at a stage should implement new crowd management measures and practice them before the next edition. The best producers turn every incident into a case study for training their teams.
By embracing frank debriefs, you essentially allow small problems to surface and be fixed before they become big problems. This culture of constant learning is what separates the truly safe and professionally run festivals from the rest. As one UK safety expert noted about Glastonbury’s approach: it has evolved year after year into a “highly and professionally managed event,” to the point that some call it “probably the safest festival” – a reflection of the continuous efforts and professionalism of everyone involved (internationalfireandsafetyjournal.com). That level of safety culture comes from never being complacent, always iterating on plans.
Training New Team Members and Refreshing Skills
Festivals, especially large-scale ones, often have a mix of veteran crew and new hires or volunteers each year. It’s vital that new team members receive training in emergency procedures as soon as they come onboard, even if they join just days before the event. A gap in knowledge on one person’s part can undermine an otherwise solid response. Here’s how to manage ongoing training:
– Onboarding Safety Training: Include a safety and emergency response module in every new hire’s orientation. This could be a workshop during the same week they start, or at least a dedicated briefing. Cover the major emergency protocols (weather holds, evacuations, medical emergencies, etc.), the chain of command, and the important do’s and don’ts (like never ignore a radio call about a missing child!). Provide them with the written playbook or quick-reference cards if available.
– Peer “Battle Buddies”: Pair new staff or volunteers with experienced crew members during drills. Learning by doing is powerful – when a newbie watches a seasoned security supervisor handle a drill scenario, they pick up cues on how to act under pressure. This mentorship approach also empowers veterans to pass on knowledge (“tribal knowledge” of the event’s quirks) to the next generation.
– Refresher Exercises: Even return staff need refreshers. Don’t assume that because someone has worked your festival for five years, they remember every protocol by heart – especially if thankfully they never had to use it. Hold brief refresher training at the start of each season or event week. Some festivals distribute “key info” sheets or run quick all-hands meetings to go over emergency signals and procedures one more time.
– Drill Inclusion: Whenever you run a tabletop or a physical drill, ensure new hires are included in some capacity. It’s tempting to keep exercises to the core operations team for efficiency, but you want new staff to get the experience too (even if as observers). If you conduct a full multi-agency drill, invite your new zone managers or team leads to sit in; if you do a radio communication test, let the new radio operators participate. The week of the festival is often hectic with new people coming in, but carving out even an hour for an emergency procedure walk-through can make a huge difference in their preparedness.
– Foster a Question-Friendly Environment: New team members might be hesitant to ask “basic” questions. Encourage a culture where they can ask anything about the emergency plan. Maybe hold an open Q&A or have a Slack/WhatsApp channel for safety questions. It’s much better they ask “What do I do if there’s a fire in my tent zone?” beforehand than freeze up during the event.
By rapidly training your newcomers, you maintain a uniformly knowledgeable crew. Remember, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link – you don’t want an untrained staffer inadvertently opening a gate that should stay closed or failing to pass along a critical message because they weren’t tuned in to the protocol. Get everyone on the same page early, and reinforce it often.
Practice Reveals Gaps: Why Rehearsals Pay Off
All this talk of drills and exercises boils down to a simple truth: practice reveals gaps that you will never see on paper. You might have a 100-page emergency plan document, but until people try to execute it, it’s theoretical. Rehearsals bring that plan to life and inevitably expose things you hadn’t considered. Perhaps the radios have blind spots in the far east field, or the “unobstructed” emergency exit is partially blocked by a food truck in practice. Maybe staff training needs tweaking when you realize some junior members hesitated during the simulation. These insights are invaluable.
Beyond finding flaws, practice also reinforces strengths:
– It builds confidence among your crew. A team that has successfully run through a chaotic scenario in a drill will trust each other and the plan when a real crisis hits.
– It conditions leadership to make quick decisions. The more you simulate high-pressure calls (like “Do we stop the show?” or “Do we call an evacuation now or wait 10 minutes?”), the better your festival directors and safety officers get at making those tough calls calmly and correctly.
– It uncovers leadership potential in your ranks. Sometimes drills reveal that a particular team member is really good in a crisis – maybe a stage manager who is cool under pressure, or a volunteer who is great at directing crowds. You can leverage those people in real incidents (perhaps assign the cool-headed stage manager to be the point person for stage evacuations, for example).
Most importantly, practice embeds a culture of safety and preparedness. Festivals at the top of their game worldwide – from Glastonbury to Electric Daisy Carnival to Fuji Rock – all share this trait: they never stop improving their readiness. They plan exhaustively, train their teams, practice scenarios, involve authorities, and then learn from each experience. This is how legendary events not only create amazing experiences for fans but also handle crises effectively when they arise. As the saying goes among safety professionals, “Plan for the worst and you’ll do your best.”
Aspiring festival producers and veterans alike should take this to heart: Make time for training, drills, and table-top exercises. It might feel like extra work in the pre-production crunch, but it pays off a hundredfold when real life doesn’t go according to script. In the end, you are responsible for thousands of lives during those event hours – and that duty of care means being ready for anything.
Key Takeaways
- Prioritize Emergency Planning: Identify the top risks (weather, crowd incidents, lost children, etc.) for your festival and have specific plans for each. Preparation is the difference between a controlled response and chaos (tseentertainment.com).
- Drill for Weather and Evacuations: Regularly rehearse weather holds, shelter-in-place procedures, and both full and partial evacuations. Use clear communication methods (PA announcements, screens, apps) and practice them so attendees will get timely information (weather.com).
- Rehearse Missing-Person Protocols: Train staff on how to respond to missing child or vulnerable person reports. Have code words and a rapid response team in place, and practice the scenario to shorten response times (www.festivalkidz.com).
- Engage All Stakeholders in Exercises: Conduct cross-agency tabletop exercises involving police, fire, medical, and other partners before the festival (internationalfireandsafetyjournal.com). Use injects to test your team’s adaptability to evolving situations.
- Debrief and Improve: After drills or real incidents, hold honest debriefs to discuss what worked and what didn’t. Update your emergency playbooks immediately with lessons learned, and make sure the changes are communicated to all staff.
- Train Your Team (Old and New): Ensure new hires and volunteers receive safety training as soon as they join, and refresh everyone’s knowledge every year. A well-informed team where everyone understands the emergency plan is crucial for effective response (preparedex.com).
- Practice to Build Confidence: Regular practice not only reveals gaps but builds a confident, crisis-ready culture. When an emergency occurs, a rehearsed team will act faster, communicate better, and keep attendees safe, protecting both lives and the festival’s reputation.
25th August 2025