Quote:
Originally Posted by Natchez
Please allow me to respectfully disagree. The Jones Dome has a disaster plan in place that includes how to handle a nearby tornado and, although I can not find the plan online anywhere, I suspect that the plan calls for partial shelter-in-place and partial evacuation to the tunnels when practical. The plan should not, and probably does not, call for withholding information from the people who will be directly affected.
In my view, what should have been done is that the field level should have been evacuated to the tunnel area leaving the floor bear and the people in the stands should have prepared for the roof to blow off and the glass in the exterior to shatter .... I don't really know if that is to shelter-in-place or proceed orderly to the tunnels; that is why the disaster plan is in place. FIRST should have followed the Jones Dome Disaster Plan.
Consider this, if you were at a Rams game and it sounded like a train was about to hit the stadium, do you really believe that it is right to let the players, staffs, & others remain on the field and hope bad things don't happen when there is very good shelter only a few hundred feet away. Also, if we enacted a "hush hush" policy in these circumstances, it seems unfair that we would not warn the people who decided to go to the bathroom or get a hotdog in a highly glassed area.
The roof blowing off a dome is a real fear and when a couple of panels get ripped off, things escalate in a hurry. In a dome, being under the primary roof is the first or second most dangerous place to be located.
Now, please allow me to defend my actions. I was on the floor and heard the sound of a train about to run into the Jones Dome from all directions. Knowing that bad things were happening outside and the fact that I did not have my handy crystal ball with me, I took action to remove participants and patrons from underneath the primary roof and into an "enclosed" area. First, I identified where people could go and then encouraged them to move to the tunnels; okay, I did not encourage the Robonauts but demanded the Robonauts get a move on it. I texted all of the Robonauts mentors (we had a group set up so it only took me a few seconds to text them) and asked them to get everyone to shelter. FIRST, obviously having their crystal ball in hand, told people that everything would be okay ..... just trust us. In review, I suspect my actions were more closely in line with the Jones Dome Disaster Plan for tornadoes than FIRST's actions.
When I read things like "the LAST thing FIRST should have done was make an announcement" because we can't trust people, I wonder what America is coming to,
Lucien
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I was not at the event but I was in contact with several friends and family there and monitored the weather when I did find out what was happening. Quickly moving from the floor to safety is relatively easy because there is plenty of room and not a lot of people. The stands is a completely different scenario because there is tons of people and limited space/walking area. Leaving a crowded stadium at the end of a game is extremely crowded and chaotic add to that chaos, panic, and disorder and you have yourselves a death trap for smaller people. Looking back to events like hurricane Katrina the main shelter was the dome in a catagory 5 storm.
The best thing to do was let people know of the serious weather outside/keep people indoors which they did and not create undue panic/hysteria. Yes there are events where we ask, "Why wasn't a warning given/more action taken?" and other times wonder why chaos was created over nothing and someone got hurt. I'm not advocating that the weather wasn't serious, but it wasn't serious enough to evacuate the building and create a panic.
I'm sure FIRST has an evacuation plan considering tornadoes tragically ripped through St. Louis the week before the Championship last year. Some might say they felt in serious danger from where they were on the floor, others in the nose bleeds say they thought the hail sounded cool and felt not danger.