By Carl Adkins

The one that wasn’t. That’s what the 2020 Men’s Final Four is likely to be called in the future. Upon writing this, tomorrow was to be Final Four Friday. Peak arrival of 80,000 fans coming to Atlanta ready for an exciting weekend of championship basketball and other amazing events. I guess It just wasn’t in the cards…

I feel a little selfish posting about this given the current situation across the globe, but felt I couldn’t let the day go by without tipping my cap to the literally thousands of the sports and hospitality professionals who had put in, and were ready to put in, a tremendous ATL effort to make this the best Final Four ever.

Airport workers, hotel staff, public safety personnel, restaurants and attractions, venue staff at the stadium for “The Big Dance,” the arena staff for the DII & DIII championships, Centennial Olympic Park’s staff for the concert series, Georgia Tech and Georgia State staff – the host institutions for the championships – over 2,000 volunteers ready to serve, literally hundreds of event professionals to bring it all to life and the Congress Center staff for the many other ancillary events, all were ready for our moment on the national stage. All of these amazing people had invested so much time, energy and effort to ensure this would have been the crowning jewel of Atlanta’s trifecta of major sporting events – the CFP National Championship in 2018 and Super Bowl LIII last year and the Final Four this year.

Now, so many of these same wonderful people are just trying to figure out how to keep going. How to stay healthy and safe, pay the rent, feed and care for their families, pay the bills while wondering what the next few weeks and months hold … truly, uncharted waters.

While the gravity of our collective situation helps put things in perspective, I still hate that all of these amazing events that bring so much joy to so many aren’t happening this year. The student-athletes who could have made the “One Shining Moment” highlight reel, the media covering the events for the fans back home, the thousands of people enjoying live music in a most beautiful setting and the millions tuned in around the country to watch the magic of March Madness’s thrilling conclusion.

My sincere thanks to the amazing NCAA staff for all of their hard work and partnership with us as a host community and last but certainly not least, our host committee team. They’ve worked tirelessly to make sure that Atlanta was represented at its best. We were all so close to the finish line of four years of outstanding, raise the bar “and one” efforts … all to have it dissipate in a matter of hours a couple of weeks ago.

While the last few weeks has helped all of us locally prepare for the “one that wasn’t,” it’s still hard to take. The weather forecast this weekend? Gorgeous. Perfect Georgia Spring weather that would feed in to the azaleas in bloom next weekend in Augusta. A couple of weeks of the best annual events in the country – produced by the best for the rest. It just wasn’t in the cards. My heart breaks for everyone involved. It also breaks for so many that are suffering across the country with our new next normal. So, for now, we just have to accept … this was the one that wasn’t.

Peace to all…

IAVM member Carl Adkins has served as Executive Director of the Atlanta Football Host Committee & Atlanta Basketball Host Committee and for 20 years prior to that was General Manager of the Georgia Dome.

For the next few Thursdays, IAVM will be releasing pre-recorded ZOOMcasts on pertinent education topics related to the challenges you’re facing during the COVID19 pandemic. Each ZOOMcast will be around 30 minutes and will feature experts in their respective fields.

After viewing these recordings please tune in the following Wednesday to discuss these topics during a live Q&A session.

This week’s ZOOMcast is on Risk Management & Disruption Risk, presented by Peter Ashwin, AVSS faculty member, and Wayne Middleton, CVE, Chair of VMA’s VMS Committee. This is part 1 of a 4-part series called Business Continuity & Resilience (BC&R).

Click HERE to view the recording.

Click HERE to register for the live Q&A session with Peter and Wayne on Wednesday, April 8 at 6pm ET / Thursday 8am in Sydney / 10 am in Aukland

Upcoming Topics Include:
Venue Deep Cleaning
Business Impact Analysis (BC&R part 2)
Leadership in Times of Crisis
Business Continuity Management (BC&R part 3)
Readiness & Resilience (BC&R part 4)
Preparing for Upward Career Mobility
Venue Conversion Update
Preparation & Recovery

By R.V. Baugus

Do you remember where you were when you found out the rapidly rising death toll in China due to the COVID-19 coronavirus? How about when you heard that the United States had registered its first positive coronavirus test? What about when you got word about the first death stateside? When the NBA suspended its season even as games were being played? When your state went into a lockdown?

We don’t tend to forget milestone dates, or at the least dates that slap us upside the head with some news that we never would come in our lifetime. But here we are, most of us at home, riding out one of the most vicious pandemic storms to ever come our way, one with no available vaccine, and one that does not discriminate whom it infects.

Many of the fortunate still work from home, but sadly millions of others in industries from A through Z find themselves furloughed or fully unemployed, victims of a virus that no one can see, an invisible plague seemingly without a true finish line.

It’s amazing what our mind recalls. I know where I was on Tuesday, September 13, 2005. It was two weeks after Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans and I was driving from Dallas to Lafayette, Louisiana, to visit Greg Davis at the Cajundome, where his University of Louisiana-Lafayette arena was housing guests (in Greg’s kind words) who had managed to leave New Orleans by bus.

Greg took me on a tour of the arena with some 3,5000 guests in place, down from a high of about 7,000. It was surreal to see concession stands that normally hawked beverages, hot dogs, and popcorns, now taped over and giving formula, diapers, and many other essentials to guests. Temporary showers were constructed just outside the arena. It was the most distant feeling from a basketball game or a concert that you could imagine.

Today, many of our members have stepped up to make their venues available for help in the battle against the deadly coronavirus. We do our best to keep up with venues who are doing their part and to share, but it is obviously always going to be an incomplete list. This is good in the sense it shows our industry for what it is — caring, available, ready to help at a moment’s notice.

We still don’t know when those symphonies, trade shows, concerts, and sports will return to our venues. We do know that they will one day, and when that day arrives, it will be the perfect marriage of venue managers and guests once again seeing each other in an environment where happiness rules the day.

(Editor’s Note: IAVM members are also unsung heroes. Many continue to show up to work, while numerous others have opened their doors (and their parking lots) to serve as makeshift hospitals, shelters for the homeless, and to serve as drive-through screening sites. And with many more in our industry at home, please be sure to thank the scores of heroes who keep us going each and every day and chronicled below)

By Steve Jones

In spite of the uncertainty that Coronavirus (COVID-19) has caused, there are still many industries filled with hard-working men and women who are continuing to work amid the coronavirus outbreak. From hospitals to delivery services, to pharmacies, to grocery stores, transportation and logistics and security companies, there are many employees who, while they may not wear capes, are our nation’s heroes. These largely unsung heroes are helping our us survive this crisis by driving vehicles filled with crucial supplies, stocking store shelves, filling prescriptions and providing essential public safety services.

Now is the time to share your appreciation or our nation’s unsung heroes. While most of are deeply thankful for the doctors, nurses, and emergency workers who are tending to the sick, we should also be appreciative for the men and women who hold essential jobs that require they show up to work during the pandemic.

The front line in the pandemic are the heroes working at grocery stores, gas stations, convenience stores and take-out restaurants. These individuals are keeping us healthy by providing essential services that we desperately need. Consider thanking your supermarket’s shop clerk who is doing their best to keep the shelves stocked with necessities and the cashier who is ringing up the purchases. Express your gratitude to the Amazon delivery person who brought essentials to your home.

Our nation should all honk in appreciation for the men and women driving tractor-trailer rigs across the country who are delivering vital food and supplies at an unprecedented pace. Some police departments in several states are helping truck drivers find safe places to park and are even arranging to get food directly to the driver.

Let’s salute our hard-working highly trained men and women that are our country’s first responders. Nationwide, there are over 1 million security professionals on the job, classified as essential personnel, who can be put in high-risk situations as they confront and detain criminals engaged in theft, trespassing, gang activity and every other manner of unlawful behavior that occurs.

Employees, shareholders and other stakeholders look to their business leaders for strength and direction. Let’s express our gratitude to the company leaders who are sharing their intel to help others during this challenging time. For example, some leaders are publicly sharing their crisis plans, which include employee communications with information about COVID-19, how it’s transmitted, what they’re doing about it, employee FAQs, and links to resources with more information.

Steve Jones is CEO of Allied Universal, a leading security and facility services company based in Santa Ana, California, and in North America with more than 235,000 employees and revenues over $8.4 billion.

By Jake Katzenberger, Mark Chrisman, and Russ Murdock

Our healthcare system has been pushed beyond capacity by the ever-growing number of COVID-19 patients. The need for hospital beds, ventilators, PPE, and isolation rooms has vastly outstripped the available supply, and the country is looking for spaces to repurpose into healthcare service. Our team of healthcare experts, along with design experts across diverse building types and engineering disciplines, can help convert existing buildings such as hotels, convention centers, and arenas into temporary healthcare facilities. We understand not only the infection-control requirements needed to convert these spaces, but also the existing infrastructure and functional layout of them. Having knowledge of both is crucial for success when making modifications to repurpose these environments to care for the sick among us.

Many of these building types are not an obvious fit for a healthcare space. As we mentioned in our previous article on negative isolation rooms, there are specific airflow requirements in place to minimize the chances of cross-contamination to caregivers and other patients when designing infrastructure serving an infectious patient. Supporting patients suffering from COVID-19 requires even further design consideration since many patients may need ventilators. Ventilators require oxygen piped from a medical gas system and must have electrical systems provided by emergency power circuits to ensure they will continue to operate in the event of a power failure. The typical requirements for negative isolation rooms, medical gas, and emergency power are not always easy to implement in alternative building sites, but it is possible.

Below we will discuss convention centers being converted into temporary hospital spaces and address some of the challenges and opportunities that exist. In all situations, discussions with the owner-operator and design/construction team will be critical to understand the patients who will be in a convention center/arena/auditorium conversion and their needed level of care.

Convention centers and similar high-occupancy venues (enclosed arenas and auditoriums) are well-suited to convert to temporary healthcare facilities or command/control centers. Convention centers by nature are flexible, convertible spaces, and the architectural and systems infrastructure decisions made during design and construction are typically done to provide adaptability for the needs of a yet undefined clientele. There are several components of an urban convention center that might be re-purposed in various ways to suit the needs of the temporary facility.

Entry/Lobby/Pre-Function: An urban or community focused convention center is most often provided with multiple points of entry at varying corners of the same city block, or perhaps across several city blocks. The entries may be adjacent to bus drop offs, or mass transit, allowing for convenient ambulatory access. If repurposed to a temporary healthcare facility, entries could be zoned or tiered to focus on a particular patient need, relying on signage at the city corners and building exterior to direct the public or emergency personnel to various entry points. One entry point might be family access/registration, another may be emergency responder/staff/private access, and a third could be more medically focused and be configured as a screening/triage station. These spaces are typically open, provided with generous power provisions, and connected to all other portions of the center in such a way that an organized “traffic” pattern could be created from the point of entry to the next stop needed for a particular occupant.

Restrooms: Convention centers are generally designed (in the large public spaces noted herein) at nominally 7-10 square feet per person, so the accompanying infrastructure must be able to accommodate that density. Large banks of public restrooms are typically accessible from both the public side (lobbies/pre-function) and the event side (exhibit halls) of the facility. While these restrooms aren’t personal or isolated, they do offer needed capacity if isolation is not required.

Exhibit Halls: The centerpiece of most convention centers, exhibit halls can be expansive open areas with soaring ceilings, flat floors, and a flexibility that is not available in most other commercial/public spaces. Exhibit halls come in varying sizes and shapes, but as an example, might be a large, 200,000 SF open space that is sub-dividable with air walls into four smaller 50,000 SF spaces. In a conversion to a temporary healthcare facility, each of those sub-dividable spaces could be assigned a different level of acuity. Schematic layout of HVAC to infectious patient pods

Exhibit halls are typically provided with access to a loading dock, configured with ramp access for direct drive in, or perhaps accessible via oversized freight elevator. Most access is maintained, even when the halls are sub-divided. Exhibit halls are often provided with an electrical infrastructure that can adapt to whatever need may be present — a common configuration provides utility floor boxes at 30-60 feet on center across the open floor of the exhibit hall. The utility boxes are highly customizable, but often are provided with 100A of power at 208Y/120V — 3 phase. Utility boxes may be provided with water service (though it is generally classified as non-potable), drains, compressed air, and low-voltage (copper/fiber) connectivity. In addition, utility boxes may be provided with a “bail-out” system of empty conduits (perhaps 4-6″) that provide connectivity to each box and out to the loading dock.

Configured as a temporary healthcare facility, the utility boxes would be the “hub” for the electrical needs, with a capacity to serve significant numbers of patient stations, or bed line-ups depending on the configuration. Similarly, the fiber/copper connectivity in each box can be used to create local monitoring and networking capability, as could the presence of Wi-Fi and DAS systems throughout the facility. If a bail-out system is available, it could be used to pull temporary medical gas hoses or water lines from infrastructure located at the loading dock. There is the possibility that if the water connections were all extended above the flood rim of the utility box that the water could be classified as potable and used for local handwashing and sanitation. The HVAC systems are often zoned by divisible space as well, providing some measure of isolation between adjoining rooms, and the occupant density of the spaces typically introduces the need for the HVAC to accommodate significant outside air volumes. In a conversion scenario, the electrical distribution is well-suited to accommodate local exhaust or filtration units as needed to create isolation or necessary pressure relationships, even if the mechanical infrastructure itself may need to be provided.

In some cases, exhibit halls are also outfitted with catwalk systems and “mega columns” that can deliver the same flexibility of services afforded by the utility boxes, perhaps even more so as “bail-out” services could be strung along the cat-walks and dropped down to the areas of the floor where they are needed below.

Meeting Rooms/Ballrooms: The desired flow of convention centers typically pushes/pulls event attendees from the exhibit halls to smaller breakout or plenary sessions in blocks of meeting rooms or a larger ballroom/multipurpose space. Though smaller in square footage and volume than the exhibit halls, the meeting rooms and ballrooms are designed with the same flexibility and sub-divisibility in mind. Power is generously provided in a combination of floor and wall outlets. Though not typically provided with the same power capacity as the exhibit halls, meeting rooms and ballrooms still generally have permanent power provisions (and temporary power provisions via company switches) to support a multitude of functions in a temporary conversion. Meeting rooms could be dedicated to high- or low-acuity patients, used as command and control space, or perhaps even as a respite zone for staff and emergency personnel. These spaces do not generally have the same ease of access to a loading dock and are typically connected to the dock through the vertical transportation systems. These spaces are often provided with carpet or similar sound absorbing materials on the floor, so provisions might be needed to temporarily remove those materials during a conversion.

Kitchen/Commissary: Given the frequency of banquet events in convention centers, many are provided with full cooking kitchens and commissaries. The benefit being they are well-suited to provide nutrition and meals to patients, families, and staff/caregivers as needed. Most kitchens/commissaries are connected via back of house service corridors and vertical transportation to the exhibit halls and meeting rooms/ballrooms, allowing for efficient and isolated delivery lanes to all parts of the facility.

Emergency Power: Convention centers are typically provided with emergency power in the form of diesel generator systems, and most are designed in accordance with Articles 700, 701, and 702 of the National Electrical Code (NEC). However, they generally are designed to support only emergency egress from the facility, not ongoing support of operations, especially for the HVAC systems, and most often only have enough diesel fuel on-site for nominally eight hours of operation or less. The loading docks do afford the opportunity to place mobile/temporary generators at the dock and provide temporary connections to the existing normal services as a means of ensuring continued operations on-site in the event of utility power failure.

Jake Katzenberger is Healthcare Technical Leader, Mark Chrisman is Healthcare Practice Director/Vice President, and Russ Murdock is Convention Center Practice Director/Vice President for Henderson Engineers.