Frank: 0:00

This is Frank Sebastian, and you're listening to One Hour to Doors.

Jon: 0:07

Welcome to One Hour to Doors, a podcast dedicated to the business control of the festivals and events industry. I'm your host, John Stone. Every episode of One Hour to Doors explores the people, issues, insights, and trends impacting the enterprise of bringing people and communities together in common cause. Today my guest is Frank Sebastian. Frank is president at Emergency Management Group Washington, providers of comprehensive emergency management planning, training, and services throughout our industry. We are recording today at the Spokane Central Library in the heart of downtown Spokane, Washington State. Frank, welcome to the show and thank you for your time today. Glad to be here. So tell us about the Emergency Management Group.

Frank: 0:56

Well, Emergency Management Group of Washington is a 501 nonprofit organization that is formed for the purpose of providing emergency management support, safety, security, planning, and administration to the special events industry. Our group consists primarily of professional emergency management individuals from various walks of life that essentially enjoy assisting the special events and bring their expertise from their day-to-day professions into that arena. What's your background? My background is I spent uh 30 years with the federal government in disaster response, uh retired from that, and then went back to work uh with the federal government uh for COVID and still remain there today as a consultant.

Jon: 1:46

I know that your group is becoming more and more of a resource, at least in Washington State. I see you popping up with more and more events. Uh what are your most popular, most called for services these days that you're providing?

Frank: 2:01

The most uh popular that we provide is the planning and operations of an incident management process that events have. Part of that involves training, pre-event planning, working with the local jurisdictions, the public safety agencies, and so forth. And then we have an element of our organization that actually provides medical safety and security personnel for various events.

Jon: 2:24

What size or scale of events is your organization able to service?

Frank: 2:31

We do very large events, uh, such as some of the Seattle events, such as Seafair. Uh, we've been involved in the Special Olympics USA games uh about four years ago, uh, all the way down to small fairs and festivals in a local community. And again, our service portfolio is very scalable. Uh for example, in a large-scale event, we may have you know upwards of a hundred uh volunteers working with us. For a small event, it may be three or four specialists that are there just to provide some guidance and consultation and so forth.

Jon: 3:04

You just described the kind of services that folks are asking for these days. What kind of services do you wish festivals and events were asking for more?

Frank: 3:14

I would say the service that uh I would like to see more events get involved in is requesting pre-event planning and agency integrations, uh moving towards a unified command concept uh as far as their safety, security, and emergency response capabilities.

Jon: 3:31

Aaron Powell So that brings an interesting thought to mind. As a promoter, as a producer, I see historically wild swings in the politics of partnering with public safety planners, with first responders, with agencies from city to city, from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The spectrum ranges from cities that fully embrace a true partnership model, a true unified command model, to other municipalities that flat out reject that kind of mindset. Things get very territorial, uh, and everything in between. There are locations I've worked in where the event crosses over multiple jurisdictions, whatever kind of line that may be. And I can literally transition from one location and one approach to a different one by stepping over a property line. Do you encounter this kind of phenomena as well?

Frank: 4:25

Yeah, we have. We've been involved in multi-jurisdictional events uh with multiple venues, which did cross various city and even county lines. One of the things that we like to talk about that's a success for that is to begin the planning process towards the unified command early on, a year, maybe a year and a half, two years out from the event. And then sometimes, you know, as you say, it'll be embraced almost immediately by an agency. Other agencies, they need to warm up to that idea. And one of the benefits that we have coming from our background, all of us working in emergency management professionals, is we come from that public service, public safety arena. So now we're not characterized as an event producer. We're more or less accepted into that as a trusted agent. And as we begin our planning and begin working with these agencies, we introduce the fact that now we're going to take their best practices, their lines of authority, their processes, and have those applied within the event that they're working. And a lot of times that clears up the miscommunication and sometimes the mistrust that they have with uh event producers. And if you look at kind of the post-mortem of some of those bad experiences, like you bring up to where it's very territorial, it's where there hasn't been good communication between the event producer and the public safety agency or no communication. And I think once you bridge that, get everybody in the same room, so to speak, get them talking, usually have a success. And then the other option that we bring out is to have a unified instant action plan. And rather than the police department creating theirs and the fire department creating theirs, and you know, the security department creating theirs and so forth, one of the things that we embrace and train on is our planning section will develop an instant action plan or an IAP that encompasses everything, as it should be. So now a large event has everything in one place, knows how to communicate up and down the chain of command, as well as bringing the other features of a true instant command relationship into that evolution of that uh event.

Jon: 6:38

I think you hit the nail on the head of that. I have come into organizations where they have not, uh, how do I say this? They have not put the right people or they've just simply not had the right resources in place as the interface to the city agencies, and things didn't go didn't go so well in the past. Once you have incidents of problematic uh things pop up with your relationship, those feelings, that mindset tends to stick. And it will stick over time, but it can be changed if you have the right people in place. I've experienced that in the city of Tacoma, where I've worked for a few years with an organization that had done a lot of work in the city of Tacoma, but public safety, they've never had a professional as their interface into the broader system. And so when I got there, I was kind of surprised at kind of the cold-shouldered standoffishness that I received. And I realized that people weren't judging me as an individual. They were judging the organization and all of the past experience. And I was able to turn that around, but it took some time. I had to earn that trust, earn that respect.

Frank: 7:47

Yeah, I use as an example many times is FEMA has a training course uh that's available to anyone, um, but mainly used by their employees, that is called Special Events Planning and Management. And in the opening part of that course, it talks about the importance of relationship building and the importance of planning. And it has a comment that the a large percentage of event producers are only interested in money and making money, not spending money on public safety and so forth. Right. And, you know, that's an old archaic way of thinking in our industry. But again, that's something that's in some training uh material that's out there and or was. The point of that being, is I think, as you say, many agencies have been burned, so to speak, yeah, by uh event producers who have not been responsive to those needs or even those commentaries from the local public safety officials. I've heard that many times, you know, is I wish, you know, so-and-so who an event we're not associated with would have that same level of commitment or involvement that your your event does. Right. And I think the you know, the part of that is you also reflect back into some best practices out there, that as an event organization, one of the early-on jobs that needs to be filled is your safety and security director. And again, if you look at the very successful organizations where those individuals have been brought, I'm talking about like, you know, the International Olympics and some of those, they bring someone from the public safety emergency management community on early on in that role. And now you've got somebody who's now building that out. So by the time you get even close to your event, you have got not only a trusted partnership, you've now demonstrated the capability to work together. You may have conducted training episodes, you may have done a lot of things before that event is even close to happening that has bridged that. And I think more event producers need to do that and look at that model.

Jon: 9:52

That is fantastic advice. I think you hit the nail on the head. The opportunity to demonstrate your, if not your competency, your commitment to getting there uh in advance of the event. The Pacific Northwest, if you go back 20 years, as far as all festivals and events go, this was kind of like the Wild West. There really wasn't a lot of regulation, there wasn't a lot of code on the books in any city, county, or state to regulate what's the dip, what are these, what are these special event things and how are they, how do we want them to run. Everybody just kind of made stuff up, but that's changed very rapidly just in the last couple of decades to where now this is festivals and events, this is a legitimate industry, and we are expected to conduct ourselves as such.

Frank: 10:37

Yeah, I think one of the another aspect of that that you're seeing is, and we had a conversation earlier about the requirement for crowd observers, crowd managers. And that's based in the you know, the national fire code that's adopted by various states and other fire jurisdictions across the country. And Seattle adopted that section, you know, 10 years ago or so that requires a ratio of trained crowd managers per every 250 attendees at a at an event. And the city, you know, had certifications for that, that an event organizer would check the block and say that they did the training and they had the certified individuals. And that was pretty much thought as a big city thing in Seattle. And a couple of years ago, that spread to smaller jurisdictions. G mentioned Pierce County was one that an event uh, which we work with had applied for their permit. It did not get their special event permit because they did not provide certifications that they had crowd managers. So the event organizer came back to us and said, Well my God, what are we gonna do? And we said, Well, let's just have a you know a certification class. So we provided a certified class accepted by the state, and all was good with that agency. So as they told them who was doing the training and it was an accepted training and accredited, they got their permit. And then like a year ago, I heard from one of the event producers up in the northeast part of King County that they had were at a meeting and asked by a fire official uh if they had this. And the particular event producer pulled out a certificate through a WFEA um training course that we'd held. And the fire marshal said, absolutely, that's what we need. And hence, I think, you know, you mentioned you've now run into that with uh the northeast part of King County and the fire jurisdiction up there. That's just I think one example of the not only the need, I mean, you certainly gotta can't argue the fact that crowd managers aren't an important part of an event. They're lifesavers. The fact that jurisdictions are now requiring that as part of the permit and equally a component as to other life safety aspects, electrical permitting, health codes for food vendors, and things like that, it just speaks to how the regulation is catching up to the professionalism in the product that event producers are doing.

Jon: 12:49

Exactly right. Your company, you operate just in the Northwest, or you operating what's what's your domain?

Frank: 12:55

Basically the Northwest at this point. We have had a couple of opportunities outside the Northwest, but so far our personnel are based here and you know our organization is based here. So we've kind of decided we'll just stay in Washington, although the door is open to potentially, you know, expanding into Oregon and other areas as time moves on.

Jon: 13:16

But your services, a lot of the trainings and such, those can be done online and don't necessarily have any geographic bounds, correct? That's true.

Frank: 13:25

We do a most of our training, with the exception of skills training, it has to be hands-on. We do in a virtual platform, and you know, at that point you can be anywhere in the world just plugged into a computer. And we've had people complete some of those trainings from all over the country.

Jon: 13:39

That's a great resource. Thinking about young people starting out in the industry and they think they might like to go into public safety, risk management, emergency management, that's only going to become more and more of a field in the future. What kind of advice uh would you recommend to folks just starting out that might want to explore this practice more thoroughly?

Frank: 14:01

It's a it's a great career. I mean, getting into the emergency management field uh gives you opportunities to serve in just a multitude of different directions, you know, uh everything from large national organizations, governmental organizations at the federal level to local government, to tribal government, and then in the private sector, uh more and more of the private sector corporations and even you know the nonprofits are now hiring emergency managers and to run various aspects of that, uh, consequence management, uh things of that nature. There's a number of degree programs out there in this area that are taught from the University of Washington, Pierce College, or just a couple that come to mind. I believe Shoreline has a or Edmonds has a program. They're great programs for folks to get into. We see people that come to us as volunteers that are students in those programs to get practical experience. And the feedback we've gotten from a number of folks who have gone on to get professional paid careers in that field were told one of the reasons they were hired because they had internship or volunteer experience working in large-scale events. So it is a game changer. I mean, it's certainly coming from my perspective and being a longtime emergency manager in the government sector. The more integration that we see with the private sector and particularly mass gatherings of people, we're having a better alignment of that. It helps us understand those roles. And when something does happen, again, it comes back to that practice of more or less speaking and operating from the same standard operating practice guide.

Jon: 15:43

When you are working in public safety, if you do it long enough, you're eventually going to find yourself in the middle of a bad day. And I know through understanding a bit about your background in federal emergency response, I know that you have spent a good part of your life traveling around the country, traveling around the world to help at some of the worst days imaginable. I am wondering, to the extent that you're comfortable talking about this, how do you take care of yourself? That's a great question. Oh, and I'm talking about over the long, in the short term and over the long run.

Frank: 16:19

No, that's a that's a that's an excellent question. And something that as professional responders that we not only train on, something that we, as managers, we enforce with their folks that work for us, is that we have behavioral help capabilities available to us. Everyone's gonna have a bad day. Everyone's gonna need to talk to somebody. And you need to have that resource to just have that conversation, whether it's a peer conversation with your battle buddy, as it's referred to sometimes, or that something we do again in in major deployments. One of the first things we're gonna do is who's your battle buddy? You know, who's that person, not necessarily your supervisor or somebody that works for you, maybe not even someone doing the same job you are, but somebody who's gonna be in that same environment who you're gonna see every day. And you can have a conversation. Hey, how's it going? You're also looking for self-recognition when you know you realize that you've had that bad day and it's cumulative and whatever, realizing it's time to go have that conversation, both internally in an organization with the professionals that we have, but also with your family and friends. Um it's very hard, and you mentioned public safety, and you see this a lot in public safety, not necessarily disaster response, to where you only associate with public safety individuals. And you've got to keep reminding yourself there's a world outside of that and to keep those relationships open and moving forward.

Jon: 17:44

That's a great piece of advice. Do you have a recent success story? What pops to mind?

Frank: 17:52

That's kind of a hard one. I mean, to me, success is and I sometimes almost make a joking comment at briefings, but success is when everyone goes home in the same condition they got here in. And I don't, you know, characterize that as being responders. If we're responding to something, we want to make sure that our responders get home at the end of that uh response for an event that we're producing. Again, we're responsible for safety and security and you know, management of anything that happens in that arena. If our guests, our patrons who came and attended the event get to go home in the same condition they arrived in, that's a good day. Uh so that's a success for us. And you know, I wouldn't characterize that as an individual success. It's more of a collective success. Knowing we're prepared to deal with any eventuality, but not having to work at an event is a good day for us. That's a great perspective. Hoping for that boring day at the office. You know, sometimes people have said that is, you know, they'll walk into an emergency operations center, particularly during an event, uh special event, where you're, you know, you're not responding to something that's happened, you're waiting for something to happen so you can respond. And you guys are just sitting around in here, you know, talking, you're not doing anything. And they look at the mass of radios and computers and screens and everything, and it's all dark. And they go, well, you know, what are you doing? Well, we're waiting, should something happen, that we can respond. And then, you know, something will happen, and all of a sudden the whole room lights up, and it may be something small, maybe something big. I think the outsider that's come in now really gets to see what that's all about and what the response is. And it's comforting, I think, to someone on the outside knowing that resource and that capability is sitting there. Absolutely.

Jon: 19:31

Is there a specific event uh that you can think of that, in your view, is employing outstanding strategies and tactics in terms of their public safety and emergency preparedness approach these days?

Frank: 19:44

Well, the one that would come to mind is the seafare events in Seattle. And I say that not because I'm part of that, but because they are leading the forefront. I mean, they have an organized emergency management department. Uh, it's been around for over 10 years. And it served very well in not only their routine community events, their marquee events they've done, but they were the producers of the Seahawks Super Bowl victory uh celebration. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, we were uh part of running that in integration with the city and other officials. So I think if you look at that program uh that like I say has existed for excess of 10 years, probably closer to about 15 years, that's a model. And it, you know, it still exists today in the same form as it did when it first started, with a lot of changes, of course. But it's you know, core concept is still there. And you know, I really don't know of other similar organizations that have something of that depth and level. And it's the commitment of the organization to, you know, to support that, to fund it, to, you know, have the forethought to think we need to have this you know aspect in as part of our event operation.

Jon: 20:58

That's a fantastic example, the Seahawks Super Bowl, that first Super Bowl victory. And uh for the edification of the listeners, when the Seahawks won the Super Bowl, first of all, that was just, you know, if you're a Seahawks fan, that was the greatest thing on earth. But there were spontaneous mass gatherings that resulted from that, and there was that parade. My mind goes to that parade where it was just a couple few days after the fact, after the victory, where there is this parade through the city, and it was massive. I have no idea what the crowd estimates were, but they were six figures. It shut down portions of the city. I know Seafair organized all that. It's like, how can they? It's amazing that they could just do that on a few days' notice. And the reality is they didn't just do that on a few days' notice, they already had a system in place. There's a saying about how you know the overnight success that was 10 years in the making. And with Seafair, I see a lot of that same kind of mindset. Like they're prepared. Year-round, they're prepared for whatever may come up. They have those kind of resources. It's a tremendous resource to the city and their region for that matter.

Frank: 22:03

And that was one of the reasons that Seafair was involved in the uh Super Bowl uh celebration, was when the Seahawks went to the city and said, we want to do this, it was strongly recommended by the city that they engage Seafair's organization because Seafair does the Torchlight Parade every year. And I know from a planning concept standpoint, we took the planning numbers we use for Torchlight Parade and said, we'll just double. And because nobody'd ever done this before. You didn't know, you had no baseline. So, okay, that sounds good. We'll double the numbers. Well, as it turned out to be, we should have probably, you know, did five or six times that. Uh there was upwards, depending on whose numbers you look at, from a half million to three quarters of a million people in downtown Seattle. And as you'll remember, there were a lot of strategies that were done to keep that parade moving, to keep crowd separation. And the success was we had no major incidences throughout that. Right. Um, which, you know, as you say, sometimes in spontaneous gatherings. The other thing is, you know, you all know the story is the following year, they were gonna do it again. And that time we actually had two weeks to plan because they wanted to wait till the playoffs. And we thought we were gonna get to, you know, do our best practices and make all our corrections we did from the year previous. And well, you know the outcome of that game on the last play. Yeah. But we won't talk anymore about that. No, we won't mention that anymore.

Jon: 23:28

Frank, how can folks find out more about your organization and your services?

Frank: 23:32

The easiest way is to go to our website. It's pretty easy. It's our company or organizational initials. It's emgwa.org. Uh, with there you can see our portfolio of services, some of the organizations we support. And again, we're a nonprofit organization. We exist on donations from the agencies and organizations we support as well as some grant funding. Um, but that also means that we're open to talk about what we do and our services without obligation to any event organizer.

Jon: 24:04

That is fantastic. And I'll be sure to put that link in the description uh portion of the podcast. Well, Frank, it's been wonderful talking with you today. Thanks so much for making the time.

Frank: 24:15

John, glad to do it. Uh, always glad to take this message and get it out in the events community. So glad to be here. And if there are any questions, feel free to contact us. All call, all call, one hour to doors.