Plan crowd safety and egress

---
name: plan-crowd-safety-and-egress
category: start
description: Plan crowd arrival, circulation, density, queuing, evacuation, and recovery with qualified safety owners. Use when an event, venue, route, or temporary structure carries material crowd movement risk.
---

# plan-crowd-safety-and-egress

## When to use

- Use for public, ticketed, high-density, unfamiliar, multi-zone, outdoor, or dynamically routed gatherings.
- Use venue instructions alone only where qualified owners confirm the standard plan fully covers the event.

## Preconditions

- Confirm jurisdiction, venue and event safety authority, competent crowd and fire specialists, emergency-service coordination, licensed capacities, site plans, expected population, operating states, weather, accessibility, safeguarding, and communication owners.

## Procedure

1. Build a crowd profile by arrival pattern, ticket state, age, mobility, disability, language, familiarity, behavior, group type, and special assistance.
2. Create a capacity and flow model for transport interfaces, approaches, searches, gates, queues, rooms, concessions, toilets, stairs, lifts, exits, dispersal, and refuges.
3. Validate dimensions, usable widths, obstructions, gradients, lighting, surfaces, doors, barriers, counterflows, temporary works, and downstream capacity on site.
4. Set safe operating capacities, density indicators, queue limits, monitoring points, triggers, decision time, and stop-admission actions through qualified owners.
5. Design accessible egress covering step-free routes, assisted evacuation, communication, refuge where approved, mobility equipment, service animals, and reunification.
6. Separate normal circulation, emergency egress, emergency access, production movement, vehicle movement, and staff deployment.
7. Define emergency decision authority for hold, reroute, stop entry, partial closure, evacuation, shelter, event pause, cancellation, and return.
8. Plan trained steward positions, competencies, welfare, communications, escalation, lost person, safeguarding, and emergency-service interfaces.
9. Exercise peak ingress, opposing flows, blocked exit, weather shift, transport loss, power loss, smoke report, medical response, and accessible evacuation.
10. Record findings, residual risk, qualified acceptance, live monitoring, incident evidence, and post-event review.

## Failure plan

- Stop opening or admission if capacity, route, barrier, staffing, communication, emergency access, or evacuation evidence is incomplete.
- Do not improvise barriers, close exits, exceed capacity, or direct a crowd against qualified venue and emergency authority.
- Provide verified instructions through multiple accessible channels and correct dangerous misinformation immediately.

## Done

- A crowd safety plan records crowd profile, operating states, hazards, controls, staffing, monitoring, triggers, and emergency decision authority
- Route and capacity verification proves usable widths, flows, capacities, obstructions, emergency access, and accessible egress
- An evacuation exercise record demonstrates alert, decision, movement, assisted evacuation, communication, accountability, and emergency handoff
- Qualified owners accept residual risk, opening conditions, live monitoring, and corrective actions