Fenty Inaugural Ball

This picture was taken around 8:30 p.m. I don't have the best camera but you can see the crowd of people in the grand lobby, to the left is East Registration which was crowded with people, you can't see the the crowed of people outside of the doors but you can see the people coming in the doors (Chaos!)





I'll will attempt to look at this from 4 different point of views.

• DC
• People that attended the event
• Security
• Behind the scenes
  

First let me give an overview leading up to the event. It was very hard to guess how many people were going to attend this event, I believe they tried to gauge this event by the turn out for Fenty's Inaugural held on Wed., Jan 3, 2007, which had lower numbers than expected. At first the Ball was expecting a turn out of around 15,000 people, because the date was changed from Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2007 to Saturday, Jan. 6, 2007 the estimated count was dropped to around 9,000 people. As you can see from news reports the amount of people that showed up almost tripled this expected number. With that said lets look at how this effected everyone involved.

1) The city:

• I'll start with this one because it's the easiest. If I could paraphrase what the Mayor said when he took the stage: You don't know how happy I am to look out and see a sea of faces as far as the eye can stretch. And that's exactly what it was, a sea of people as far as the eye could see. Great support for the new Mayor, a beautiful night, and to top it all off... it was free (with a cash bar of course).

2) People that attended the event:

• I was not in the crowd of people waiting to get into the event but I observed the crowed of people. It was more like a Mob of people. Lines were long (what lines it was just a mass of bodies), very limited seating, very crowded to get into the halls. I saw the mass of people in the ABC concourse, Grand lobby, East Registration, out front on Mt. Vernon Street wrapped around the building. Now when I say out front of Mt. Vernon Street I mean there was a huge mass of people waiting to get into the building blocking the entrance doors. From someone looking at the sea of people it was sheer madness.

3) Security:

• Before I get into what I saw let me tell you how it was set up before the event started. It looked very nice! there was to be a line formed from Mt. Vernon, people were to be taken to a staging area located in East Registration where there was seating, from East registration groups of people were to be filed in an orderly fashion through the grand lobby, down the escalators that lead to ABC concourse to a line in front of A or B Hall, at that point they were to go through a security check point then into the halls. All this looked good but it did not work. It started out fine till everyone showed up. A mob of people were at the front doors spilling into the grand lobby, a line of people went up 7th and 9th street, East registration was packed, AB concourse was packed and getting worse, security screeners could not keep up with the masses, the fire marshal stepped in and tried to bring order to the chaos, at different times entrance to the building and also to the halls was temporarily shut down till some type of action plan was put in place to bring order to the chaos. Around 8:30 p.m. security to get into the halls was eliminated and anyone could get in. Around 9:30 p.m. no one could get into Halls A & B so C hall had to be opened up. Now take into account that the event started at 7:00 p.m. and it's now 9:30 p.m. and there still was a massive amount of people trying to get into the event.

4) I saved the best for last... Behind the Scenes:

• I was part of behind the scenes so believe me when I say we did our best given what we had to work with. so you ask, could the WCC have done a better job? The answer is yes. In many areas we fell short but we did our best to accommodate everyone. After this night I asked myself many questions. I had to wear many hats this night, Not only taking care of the housekeeping end but helping with security, meeting services, and show management. Because of this I must touch on each area. This event was to be a standing event with designated seating for senior citizens... this did not happen and it was not enforced, once people started sitting down everyone wanted to sit down, it put meeting services in a bad position because they were trying to bring out more tables and chairs during the event and when hall C was opened tables were still being set up and people were actually fighting over chairs (no joke on this). Security was understaffed and being pulled all over the place to handle crowed control and different situations, one situation that I observed was when airwalls C were opened up a mad rush of people ran (have you ever seen ladies in high heels and nice evening gowns run and fight over chairs?) to get chairs that were in storage, security had to be called because they actually pushed past the doors and went back into storage and began to take chairs for themselves... madness! Now for my job, housekeeping... We got no complaints and we did out best even though we were stretched thin like all other departments.
  

I mentioned earlier that after the event I had to think on what happened and here are some of my thoughts.

1. What could have been done to handle the crowds of people better?
2. What could have show management done to make this event run smoother given the budget we had to work with?
3. What would have happened if the building needed to be evacuated during this event? (This one is big on my mind!)
4. When the security screeners stopped checking people for weapons and allowed anyone to enter the hall what would have happened if someone had a firearm or even worse... explosives? with 20,000 - 25,000 people in the halls it would have been a major disaster.
5. Seating was a mess... for future events, how could show management do a better job in enforcing this? It is my understanding that the fire marshal got involved in seating (among many other things.) I felt sorry for the senior citizens that were left standing when the priority seating should have been enforced for senior citizens.

A lot went wrong behind the scenes, but I have to say overall they did a decent job. No one got hurt and there were no injuries or incidences. To me that's amazing considering the number of people that attended the event! After this event my legs and body were burned out. We all learned something from this and will be better prepared if we are to host another event like this. On a heads up we will have to be better prepared, the presidents functions will be taking place and we don't want what happened during this event to take place during the presidents events.

I could probably write all day about this event and I touched on a few things that were running through my head. I'm sure many more people behind the scenes could bring up more items of discussion like Centerplate, with the number of people present they only had enough food to last till 9:30 p.m. after that it was slim pickings. But that's not my area of expertise so I'll leave that alone. On my end... great job housekeeping!