Severe weather can occur at any time of the year, although many areas across the country see the majority of their severe weather from March through August.  As our venues approach the busy spring event season, we thought it would be good to remind our venue managers about severe weather preparedness. We encourage you to sign up for IAVM’s Severe Weather Preparedness taking place March 4-5 at the National Weather Center in Norman, Oklahoma. In the meanwhile, here are some amazing lightning facts that might inspire you to take action.

Lightning Facts 101

Lightning takes many forms: cloud-to-cloud, cloud to ground, or the reverse, as ground-to-sky discharge. Regardless of the direction of the lightning stroke, a great deal of energy is released as the electrical charge balance of the earth’s atmosphere is restored.

There is an average of 25 million lightning strikes each year. Each day the earth is struck by lightning about 10,000 times so that’s about 100 strikes per second.

Top 5 States                                      Strikes per Year      Strikes per Square Mile

#5 South Carolina/Oklahoma (tie)            451,841                                             14.6

#4 Alabama                                                824,171                                            15.9

#3 Mississippi                                             856,384                                           18.0

#2 Louisiana                                               942,128                                            20.3

#1 Florida                                                    1.45 million                                       25.3

Continue Reading →

Our get-a-member campaign, iCommit, is currently under way, and with your help we can increase our membership by adding 500 new members by March 31. This would take IAVM to an unprecedented community of 4,700 members. More members means more collaboration, a bigger and more diverse network for you, and a greater pool of experts to create inspiring and motivating educational sessions at conferences.

Let’s look at it this way: If every member strives to add just one new member, we could DOUBLE our membership by March 31—certainly by the end of 2014. How exciting!

Will you commit to help IAVM build a stronger association and a bigger network of like-minded leaders? We hope so! You did an amazing job last year and helped us achieve record numbers. Your passion for the industry is contagious, so let’s work together to grow your association .

What’s In It For You?

Besides feeling good about supporting the industry, for each new member that you refer who actually joins IAVM, your name will be entered into a raffle to win one of five $500 Apple gift cards (generously provided by Ungerboeck Software) to apply toward the purchase of any Apple product including an iPad, iPhone, or iPod—your choice! The more members you bring, the more chances you will have to win. The campaign ends March 31, 2014.

To ensure you are eligible to win, make sure the new member who joins lists your name in the Applicant Section titled “Who Recommended IAVM To You?” and enters “iCOMMIT” in the Promotional Code field in the Payment Method section of the membership applications.

If you have questions, please contact me or Summer Beday at 972.906.7441 or membership@iavm.org. We value and appreciate your support of IAVM!

(Image: Orange Photography)

Winter Storm Leon lunged into the southern parts of the U.S. this past week. Sure, you can quote Charles Dudley Warner and say, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” But that’s not true. There are people out there who are doing something about it, primarily in the preparedness field.

Consider IAVM member Leonard Bonacci and John Comerer. Bonacci is vice president of stadium events and operations for Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, and Comerer is the stadium’s security director. They are part of a team that ensures the safety of all guests during events. In our latest issue, Joe DesPlaines wrote a story about how Bonacci and Comerer handled a Shelter-In-Place (SIP) during a storm at Taylor Swift concert. DesPlaines does a great job explaining the before, during, and after aspects of the situation, and he had Bonacci and Comerer identify key lessons learned:

• “There were some guests that refused to shelter, even with the lightning! Mostly these were fans in the ‘pit’ who didn’t want to lose their place as space in this area in front of the stage was given on a ‘first come’ basis. We ultimately had to ask the police for help, and we now know to routinely use the uniformed officers to clear the pit.”
• “We also found that people moved out of the seating areas fairly quickly but stopped when they entered the concourse and/or service area tunnel, effectively stopping the sheltering. We quickly learned that we needed to position some staff at the entrance to move people into the concourse, to accommodate all the guests.”
• “We had some guests who were very frightened of the thunder and lightning. We realized that we had to take special care with guests who panic and become immobilized.”
• “This event confirmed our training to be prepared to respond with urgency. Storms move fast and lightning can strike miles from the storm center. Activating the SIP plan was an immediate call to act quickly to maintain the safety of the guests and staff.”
• “Emergency planning must be totally transparent. All participants including venue employees, police, fire, EMS, tour staff, and even the performers need to know there is a plan and what actions we will take if activated. It was our understanding that even the star knew her shelter location.
• “Having executive leadership ‘buy-in’ to emergency response is invaluable . Their support and encouragement really motivates the staff.”
• “Communication is key to a successful shelter—with guests and staff. Providing information, even if it was a repeat of something previously stated, helped keep everyone calm.”
• “All the practice paid off—it was rehearsal for the real emergency.”

Training to properly respond is what drives the program at Severe Weather Preparedness & Planning for Public Assembly Venues and Events, which takes place March 4-5 at the National Weather Center in Norman, Oklahoma. There you will be trained on such topics as atmospheric electricity (lightning threats), safe sheltering, and crowd dynamics. All the instructors are experts in the safety, security, and weather fields. Registration is open and available for members and non-members.

You can now blame your gender on your inability to remember things. According to researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, men have worse memories than women.

“It was surprising to see that men forget more than women,” said Jostein Holmen, a NTNU professor. “This has not been documented before. It was also surprising to see that men are just as forgetful whether they are 30 or 60 years old. The results were unambiguous.”

More than 48,000 Norwegian people took part in a longitudinal study, and nine  questions dealt with memory. The results—published in BMC Psychology—show that “subjective memory impairment” was reported by half the participants, with men reporting the most problems for eight out of the nine questions. Remembering names and dates were the most common problems. And your education level matters. Those more highly educated have better memories , and those who are more often anxious or depressed have memory problems.

“We have speculated a lot about why men report more frequent problems with remembering than women do, but have not been able to find an explanation,” Holmen said. “This is still an unsolved mystery.”

(photo credit: Rusty Clark via photopin cc)

Forget wrath, greed, sloth, etc. These are the seven sins updated for an always-on culture that likes to keep its social media close and its email closer.

“Back in the dial-up era, when going online had a cost implication, most people checked email maybe once a day and often responded as soon as they read them,” said Dr. Emma Russell, a psychologist from Kingston Business School in England. “Now, with broadband and 3G, unlimited numbers of messages can be streamed through smartphones at any time of the day or night. However many of us haven’t adapted our behavior.”

Responding to emails on your off hours is one of the sins.

“This puts pressure on staff to be permanently on call and makes those they are dealing with feel the need to respond,” Russell said. “Some workers became so obsessed by email that they even reported experiencing so-called phantom alerts where they think their phone has vibrated or bleeped with an incoming email when in fact it has not. Others said they felt they needed to physically hold their smartphone when they were not at their desk so that they were in constant email contact.”

Russell analyzed email usage across different companies, marking positives and negatives, and identified these seven email sins.

1. Ping pong – constant emails back and forth  creating long chains
2. Emailing out of hours
3. Emailing while in the company of other people
4. Ignoring emails completely
5. Requesting read receipts
6. Responding immediately to an email alert
7. Automated replies.

How many of these sins are you committing?

(photo credit: alexander_witt via photopin cc)