Dozens of deaths occur annually across the nation due to severe weather, and giving fans, staff and teams ample time to evacuate a venue before lightning strikes is key to keeping them safe. Many stadiums, college campuses and outdoor festivals now rely on on-site experts to tell them where and when a storm is coming.
Notre Dame (Ind.) Football Stadium emergency and security staff count an on-site meteorologist as an essential member of the crew. Located in Indianapolis near the southeastern tip of Lake Michigan, the venue consistently finds itself in the crux of bad weather.
“I want access to someone who can say, ‘Something is happening over Lake Michigan,’” said Michael Seamon, vice president for Campus Safety and Event Management at Notre Dame.
According to DTN, a weather monitoring company, it’s vital for venue managers at outdoor sports and events to monitor the weather, understand the threat and make the call to evacuate for the safety of players and fans, which is no easy task.
The results of failing to act can be catastrophic. A DTN study just released reported that in the past 10 years, 313 people have been killed by lightning in the U.S. And 64 percent of all lightning fatalities are attributed to leisure activities, with 15 percent coming from sports.
Two major events happened in Indiana in 2010 and 2011. At the Indiana State Fair, high winds caused a stage rigging to collapse on stage crew and the audience moments before Sugarland was scheduled to play. Nine people died in the incident when a severe thunderstorm with volatile winds hit the fairgrounds, toppling the stage. The accident caused venue operators nationwide to start reviewing their severe weather warning systems and evacuation plans.
The Indiana State Fair incident took place a year after a 20-year-old freshman at Notre Dame was killed when a 40-foot aerial lift buckled due to 50 mph winds.
“It was where we paused and said, ‘OK, weather is such a critical matter,’” Seamon said. So Seamon and Notre Dame officials hired a DTN meteorologist to be on-site at every football game (80,000 attendance) and college commencement (30,000).
During football season, Notre Dame sees three weather seasons — hot and humid at the end of summer, rain and wind in the fall and snow in the winter.
DTN Meteorologist Brad Nelson is the Notre Dame on-site weather coach, alerting Seamon and his team what they should pay attention to and when to cancel games.
Nelson has been an on-site meteorologist for nine years and has vast experience evacuating large crowds. DTN works with entertainment and sporting venues across the globe, including all the PGA tours. “Our on-site services started as a result of two (lightning) deaths in 1991 at the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) tours,” Nelson said.
Now, the company has seven meteorologists who work the PGA tour, Champions Tour, web.com Tour, Ladies Professional Golfers Association (LPGA), PGA of America, the Indiana State Fair, Indianapolis, Notre Dame and several festivals and concerts, Nelson said.
“For one, they need to be aware of lightning detection. Not every shower has lightning. It’s the isolated lightning strikes that have the real danger. It’s not from big, large intense thunderstorms… it’s usually from these smaller cells that you can’t see coming,” Nelson said. “It’s not just lightning, it’s also these high winds at events.”
DTN uses sophisticated weather data to track storms around Notre Dame — tools that are both on and off site.
“The one thing you have to do is get all the information out to fans as fast as possible, and it’s more dangerous to hide information from the fans than to tell them what’s happening on the video board,” Nelson said.
In the last 10 years, Notre Dame has evacuated the stadium twice. Both evacuations took place during a football game on Sept. 3, 2011.
“We were playing South Florida. It was Labor Day weekend,” Seamon said. Bad weather struck and before they knew it, they were communicating with everyone in the stadium to evacuate.
Originally, officials thought it would take 40 minutes to clear the venue, yet, “our first evacuation took 28 minutes,” Seamon said. “Our second evacuation took 20 minutes.”
Seamon believes the second evacuation went faster because many fans didn’t return to the stadium after the first evacuation. People are routed to the covered concourse or out of the stadium and into the field house or the basketball arena.
Intense evacuation training of staff, including food vendors, coaches and more, takes place several times a year, Seamon said. Stadium officials have a variety of ways — via text messages, scoreboards and announcements — to communicate with fans during bad weather, before, during and after events.
Additionally, most people are keenly aware of weather concerns in advance of entering the stadium, Seamon said.
“We know people have their mobile apps and their phones. Everyone is tracking the weather on game day. Most people are aware,” he said.
Real time data is key for Seamon and his staff in keeping people safe. Prior to contracting with DTN, Notre Dame reached out to TV meteorologists, but found their priority is the television station, not the venue. They are on air.
There are a number of high-profile weather tracking companies employed by outdoor events, including Baron, a critical weather intelligence company. Baron recently released the Baron Threat Net suite of products, featuring operations center, mobile and web-based accessibility. Baron Threat Net allows users to monitor weather and safety for situational awareness by location and includes simple custom alerts including Baron’s exclusive location-based Pinpoint Alerting and standard alerts from the National Weather Service (NWS).
Baron doesn’t have on-site meteorologists at venues on game days, Glen Denny, Baron president of enterprise, said it does pride itself in its high-tech weather tracking system. Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., is one of the college campuses that contracts with Baron.
“They use us for their overall campus safety,” Denny said. “We quality control all the information that’s coming in. We send out automatic alerting in the form of a text message or email.”
The company also works with the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and Kings Dominion amusement park, Doswell, Va.
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METEOROLOGISTS BRING EARLY ALERTS
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