For each venue and every event, you should have a designated operations center that serves as your control hub and basecamp. Your ops center will coordinate information and resource deployment for your team as well as local, regional, state and federal partners. 

Your operations center will work toward the following shared goals. 

• Provide a common operating picture 

• Give timely and accurate situational awareness for emergency operations

• Offer a platform for effective multi-jurisdictional decision making

• Coordinate between public safety and venue operations

• Provide timely and effective incident response and necessary resources

• Coordinate intelligence and investigations

• Manage facility issues

• Organize recovery 

It is particularly essential to centralize communications when there is little inter-agency communications, and it’s easier to keep everyone informed and on the same page when there is a centralized hub for information gathering and flow. Your operations center will reduce time to react and respond and will allow for easier and better coordinated conferencing. Your operations center also offers centralized resource management and consistent communications. 

Related Certificate Courses: Emergency Preparedness for Events

The make-up of this ops center depends on the scope of your meeting or event and the number of different jurisdictions involved (event and venue staff, hired security, city and emergency personal, etc.). Depending upon the event/venue, this could be a small workroom with a phone or a larger room with monitors, radios and computers. It is scalable based upon your event. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, the ops center should serve as your hub of control, information fusion and decision making. Multi-venue events can utilize one central connected operations center with dispatch centers located at larger satellite venues. Where ever or however you are organized, every event needs one place for centralized coordination.