Sports Security Center to Conduct Table Top Exercise at Meadowlands Stadium
Tue, 03/01/2011 - 02:34pm | By: Van Arnold
The University of Southern Mississippi's National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security (NCS4) will conduct a sport event incident exercise at New Meadowlands Stadium, home of the National Football League New York Jets and New York Giants, on Thursday, March 3.
This table top exercise will allow the stadium security personnel, from first responders to senior sport event officials, to validate their training and augment critical decision making in the key capabilities of preparedness, response and assessment in a risk-reduced environment. The project team will be introducing SportEvac: First Responder Training System as part of the exercise.
“The overall goal of this project is for the New Meadowlands Stadium local emergency response teams to assess their preparedness and identify areas for improvement,” said NCS4 Director Dr. Lou Marciani. “It will also provide our project team an environment to receive feedback on ways to enhance SportEvac and the methodology for table top exercise's delivery and assessment. This is a cooperative project with the National Football League organization.”
The NCS4 project team has been developing a computer-based modeling, simulation and visualization tool to effectively, economically and rapidly verify and validate response tactics, all emergency plans and procedures to conduct “what-if” scenario analyses prior and during an incident.
To assist in that process, NCS4 has partnered with Regal Decision System on the evacuation planning tool and NVision Solutions for geospatial aspects in the ongoing development of SportEvac software.
“SportEvac is currently being used to enhance the experience during table top exercises by utilizing geospatial information, resource management tools, information sharing resources and 3D visualizations,” said Kevin Bupp, geospatial software developer at NVision Solutions. “This table top exercise at the New Meadowlands Stadium, and all future exercises, is very important because it provides an opportunity to train first responders for potential undesirable situations during a spectator sport. The better prepared the first responders, the better and more efficient the response.”
Established in 2006, the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security was created to provide an interdisciplinary academic environment to further increase sport security awareness, improve sport security policies and procedures and enhance emergency response through evacuation, recovery operations and crowd management training.
For more information about NCS4 call 601.266.6183 or visit www.NCS4.com