GREEN BAY, Wis. (WFRV) – The Green Bay Metro Fire Department has played an active role in planning and overseeing the NFL Draft campus in a proactive effort to ensure that protocols are followed and unforeseen issues do not arise.
“Our fire marshals are working diligently to make sure we’re preparing for fires. The best kind of fire is the one that’s prevented,” Chief Matthew Knott said. “Also, our hazardous material team will be there monitoring multiple things and working with some other agencies.”
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The bulk of this work can be accomplished with the aid of the permitting process, which is needed for any event or structure that is either permanent or temporary.
“We’ll look at all the cooking areas, we’ll monitor where the tents go, and make sure the proper exiting exists,” Knott said. “So all of these things have been working for probably the last year now.”
From start to finish, the department is a needed element in the planning, construction, and disassembly of the draft stage.
“We’ll have personnel on scene most every day once the stage begins being constructed,” Knott said. “That’s our fire marshals doing inspections, and our crews going in and doing orientation tours.”
On the paramedic side of responsibilities, the department is planning heavy use for its bicycle and UTV fleets.
“There’ll be a team of paramedics walking around, also with our bike teams, and we’ll also have UTVs that are able to take patients from inside to outside where the ambulances will be located,” Knott said.
The department expects to find the bulk of its patients this way, mostly dealing with minor injuries.
“We do anticipate dealing with a lot of the walking wounded, so to speak, the individual that may have a blister or a twisted ankle or any mild injury like that that we can deal with on site,” Knott said.
If there are more severe or numerous injuries, that has been taken into consideration when designing the event layout.
“We have response plans for dealing with mass casualty scenarios for triage, and one of the things we’re really working on there is the event space and layout,” Knott said.
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In addition to a more expansive area and less parking, the biggest difference from a game day that the department will have to navigate is the open-ended event times of the draft.
“Game day operations have a definitive start time and a definitive end time, and it’s confined to a certain geographical area,” Knott said. “This is more of a broader area and less of those time constraints too.”
