Hi all,
I came across this forum topic quite late, so sorry for that.
Let me start by thanking everyone who helped in this evacuation process, and helped us to make the best out of this weekend for the players.
I believe it's the role of a TO (= ourselves) to make sure that our entire event team (the people in charge of the event, not the ones in charge of the tournament) are fully aware of the evacuation procedures of the venue.
Every venue we go to have their own procedures, and they take the lead in these procedures. In some venues, they actually do take the lead, in others (like the one in Prague) we as a TO better take initiative if we want it to actually happen. For those of you who attended GP Brussels in 2015, you might remember we had a team of safety consultants who did an audit of the safety procedures and safety of the event. We took their feedback as the basis of our safety planning.
As Jonas mentioned before, we've integrated “safety briefings” at our events in 2016 (after the audit at GP Brussels), and made these obligatory for all judges to attend before the start of their shifts. This caused many negative feedback from the community, as this is not very interesting and requested an earlier arrival before your shift. I must admit that the content could have been optimized, but from our perspective, it was a first step in creating awareness for this topic.
It's up to us to make shure that all parties involved in the management of an evacuation (TO, production staff, stage staff & team leads) know these procedures as well. That's why we started with staff-briefings on Thursday night, instead of the obligated judge briefings.
We're happy to see that many people in the community now feel the need for these briefings and are more open for this.
We did an internal debriefing of this event to update our procedures and internal communication process, and will continue doing so for our upcoming GPs.
Wouter Maenhaut
Managing Partner
tournamentcenter.eu / Play-MTG.eu
wouter@tournamentcenter.eu