While millions of people spent their Super Bowl Sunday glued to the action on the field at US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, MN, hundreds of response and security personnel were focused on everything but the game. Through strong partnerships with federal, state, and local public safety agencies, the City of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police and Fire departments spent months forming a strong coalition of expertise and resources to ensure safety for the more than one million people who attend the Super Bowl LII festivities from January 26 through February 4, 2018.
As the premier technical leader in responding to and successfully resolving nuclear and radiological threats worldwide, the Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) provided technical assistance to Super Bowl response and security coordinators to plan for incidents, including terrorist threats, involving the use of nuclear materials. DOE/NNSA response assets conducted Preventative Radiological/Nuclear Detection (PRND) activities to ensure a safe and incident-free Super Bowl. Working with these highly specialized teams from DOE/NNSA, EMSI’s Ted Jakubowski and Buck Latapie deployed to Minneapolis in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl to serve as members of the Incident Management Team (IMT).
This IMT supported activities at the city’s Multiagency Coordination Center (MACC), which served as the interagency hub for security operations, as well as within DOE/NNSA’s Tactical Operations Center (TOC), which served as a functional command post for PRND operations. The IMT helped to ensure that the DOE/NNSA support to the event was seamlessly integrated with their state, local, federal and private sector partners. This was the second straight year EMSI personnel deployed in support of Super Bowl security efforts and is yet another example of the real-world response support capabilities that EMSI can bring to bear with our extensive cadre of seasoned response and incident management professionals.
EMSI has provided emergency management contract support to DOE since 2007 and currently works with several DOE programs. EMSI’s vast experience in complex incident management and hazardous materials response has helped inform some of the advanced incident management approaches to Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) incident management. EMSI personnel have been involved in the management of several complex hazardous materials incidents, including the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster in 2011.
EMSI is a service disable veteran owned (SDVOSB), minority business enterprise (MBE) that supports a broad range of clients. To learn more about EMSI and how we can help your organization’s response preparedness, please visit www.emsics.com.