Evacuation Planning Guide for Stadiums

Exercising the Evacuation Plan utilizing HSEEP guidance is important to validate the
plan and to help ensure that the plan is periodically reviewed and updated. The exercise
should involve all the key stakeholders involved in developing, maintaining, and
implementing the Evacuation Plan, and should be lead by a trained crowd manager. In
order for realistic outcomes to be realized from an exercise, realistic data is important.
For example, an evacuation decision timeline obtained from an exercise might not work
if evacuation times during a real event are different from what the emergency planners
assumed. Therefore, it becomes critical that exercise planners perform a comprehensive
evacuation study in order to get a good sense of evacuation time estimates (ETEs) for
different event scenarios at a stadium and comply with life safety codes of the National
Fire Protection Association. ETEs can be used during the exercise to test the plan, and
they can also be developed based on the different components of a plan. Developing an
exercise plan and validating its components using ETEs in an exercise is an iterative
process.
In many instances it is not practical to ask a large number of volunteers to participate in
an evacuation exercise since it is very resource consuming. In recent years there has been
tremendous growth in the fields of traffic and building modeling and simulation. There
are now robust models available in the market to model many levels of complexity.
Exercise planners can use such models to get ETEs, and incorporate ETEs in the
evacuation decision timeline. In order to test the plan and evacuation decision timeline,
these ETEs should be used in an exercise. These realistic ETEs will make any evacuation
exercise more focused and results-oriented.
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