09.Dec.2011 Crowd Control is Key

Sad to say, we live in an age where one needs to be exceptionally defensive about risk factors of any sort. This particularly applies to business owners in urbanized environments, who find themselves increasingly caught up in all sorts of unanticipated group actions from protest marches to flash mobs and all the way up to full blown riots. Even the best behaved groups of people attending public events such as concerts or special cultural events can create issues of proper crowd control.

Preventative measures are the key to successfully maintaining control and avoiding expensive lawsuits for negligence. Every business needs a written contingency plan for what to do when things go wrong. Of course, it is impossible to have a detailed plan for everything, so most businesses need flexible designs that are intended to prevent accidents under unexpected conditions. It is not enough to say that there is a plan on page 46 of the company handbook. It must be a credible effort, which all employees are familiar with and able to put into action at a moment’s notice.

The travel industry is particularly susceptible to crowd control nightmares. Since many of their customers are already in unfamiliar environments, their hosts act as a legally responsible party more than in other cases. The tragic loss of the RMS Titanic in 1912 is a perfect example of this responsibility. Passengers naturally assumed that the price of a ticket included safe delivery to New York or sufficient measures designed to guarantee their safety in the event of something unlikely, such as running into an iceberg in the middle of the night.

If the White Star Line had a proper contingency plan in place, and the necessary number of lifeboats to carry out their measures, the story of the Titanic would have been an historical footnote rather than a fascinating tragedy that has lasted for more than a century.

The moral of the story is simple. Every business needs to plan ahead and have all of the equipment and procedures in place to carry out their plans at any random moment.