I've begun the process of educating my school district on the safety standards that are laid out in NFPA 101 Life Safety and the ANSI standard for Crowd Management. I thought I would share what I have learned with you as I have the feeling a lot of us in educational theater world are not addressing the standards.
First off take a look a what the NFPA 101 Life Safety Code says about Crowd Managers. NFPA hopes you will pay for a downloadable copy, but you can read it for free by going here and registering. Once you have access to view the code, hit the table of contents button and then select Chapter 13 off to the side. Now start clicking next until you find section 13.7.6. and 13.7.7. Here you will find that the Life Safety Code requires one trained and regularly tested crowd manager for every 250 people in your theater. Do you have those? I don't. I have a lot of parent volunteer ushers, it's not the same thing.
Next go over to Chapter 4 in the table of contents and next page your way until you find section 4.8. Do you have an Emergency Action Plan on file with your AHJ? When was it last updated?
Finally, lets check out the new ANSI Standard that ESTA and the Event Safety Alliance created about Crowd Management. Go here to download it.
These are standards. Nothing in these documents is a legal requirement. You can't be fined by a government agency for not following them. However if there is some sort of an accident and someone gets injured, you can be sued and found negligent because you were not following industry best practices. Being unaware that these standards exist is not a legal defense. So it's important that you find a way to address these issues. There is also some flexibility in the standards based on the opinion of your AHJ, so communication with them is critical.
First steps... In my district, there are three other people at sister schools who do my job. I've sent all this information to them and we are going to do our on research and assessment of the situation then get together and go through it. We plan to put together a presentation for the administration.
We have some informal documents that are the bare bones of an Emergency Action Plan. Over the months ahead, I need to work on formalizing those documents to hit all the points in the standard and contacting my AHJ to share my plan with them.
I did my own "DIME-ICE" assessment of my theater (See the ANSI Standard for more info). I plan to talk this over with some of my crew and get feedback from them.
It's OVERWHELMING to find out how much work needs to be done. I work hard to make sure our physical space is safe. But we don't do a good job of crowd management. Bringing everyone up to speed and explaining to the school district that we need to create the position of Crowd Manager and get those people trained is going to be a huge task.
Let me know if you are new to this code and face a similar journey. Let's find ways to support each other through this process.
First off take a look a what the NFPA 101 Life Safety Code says about Crowd Managers. NFPA hopes you will pay for a downloadable copy, but you can read it for free by going here and registering. Once you have access to view the code, hit the table of contents button and then select Chapter 13 off to the side. Now start clicking next until you find section 13.7.6. and 13.7.7. Here you will find that the Life Safety Code requires one trained and regularly tested crowd manager for every 250 people in your theater. Do you have those? I don't. I have a lot of parent volunteer ushers, it's not the same thing.
Next go over to Chapter 4 in the table of contents and next page your way until you find section 4.8. Do you have an Emergency Action Plan on file with your AHJ? When was it last updated?
Finally, lets check out the new ANSI Standard that ESTA and the Event Safety Alliance created about Crowd Management. Go here to download it.
These are standards. Nothing in these documents is a legal requirement. You can't be fined by a government agency for not following them. However if there is some sort of an accident and someone gets injured, you can be sued and found negligent because you were not following industry best practices. Being unaware that these standards exist is not a legal defense. So it's important that you find a way to address these issues. There is also some flexibility in the standards based on the opinion of your AHJ, so communication with them is critical.
First steps... In my district, there are three other people at sister schools who do my job. I've sent all this information to them and we are going to do our on research and assessment of the situation then get together and go through it. We plan to put together a presentation for the administration.
We have some informal documents that are the bare bones of an Emergency Action Plan. Over the months ahead, I need to work on formalizing those documents to hit all the points in the standard and contacting my AHJ to share my plan with them.
I did my own "DIME-ICE" assessment of my theater (See the ANSI Standard for more info). I plan to talk this over with some of my crew and get feedback from them.
It's OVERWHELMING to find out how much work needs to be done. I work hard to make sure our physical space is safe. But we don't do a good job of crowd management. Bringing everyone up to speed and explaining to the school district that we need to create the position of Crowd Manager and get those people trained is going to be a huge task.
Let me know if you are new to this code and face a similar journey. Let's find ways to support each other through this process.
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