Watching the Super Bowl has become an unofficial holiday in the United States, with untold amounts of planning and coordination for the big game occurring in the weeks and days leading up to the event.[1,2] On average, Americans tend to shell out $81.17 for their Super Bowl party-planning efforts.[3] But what if your party list included half a million people?[4] Our panelists responded to a series of questions about their experiences in the days, weeks, and months in advance of Super Bowl LIII. Here you will learn about the importance of the most basic concepts of developing trusted relationships, collaboration, planning, and information sharing. If you work in an area near where a large-scale event is coming soon, know that there is work going on behind the scenes like you can’t imagine. The invisible veil of public health protection is heavy, and it’s all around us.
Food Safety Magazine(FSM) convened an expert panel, moderated by Editorial Advisory Board member Jason Bashura, M.P.H., RS, senior manager, global food defense, PepsiCo, to address some of the more critical questions regarding the challenges of adequate prior planning for large-scale events. Participating panelists were Tom Beacorn, Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) coordinator, U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA-FSIS), Lenore Musick, executive director, administration, Georgia State University (GSU), and Venessa Sims, MEP, GA-CEM, director of emergency management, Georgia Department of Agriculture (GDA).
FSM: Please describe what your food safety-related responsibilities were prior to the day of the event. How did you plan ahead for what these would be?
Tom Beacorn: I serve as a senior staff officer for FERN at USDA-FSIS. FSIS’s mission is to protect public health by ensuring the safety of the nation’s commercial supply of meat, poultry, and processed egg products. One of my responsibilities is ensuring that FSIS-regulated products are safe to eat at special security events, which are national or international events that the Department of Homeland Security has deemed to be a potential target for terrorism or other criminal activity. A recent special security event was Super Bowl LIII, including several game-week events in Atlanta. FSIS played a significant role in testing meat, poultry, and egg products to ensure their safety for consumers.
Over the years, I’ve been involved in several food defense activities for a variety of high-interest events, such as the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 2012 and 2016 and the presidential inaugurations in 2013 and 2017. When working these events, it’s essential to develop and maintain working relationships and effective lines of communications with partner federal agencies and other organizations. Working together as a food defense system, rather than as siloed agencies, enhances the collective awareness of potential hazards, further protecting the public.
A good example of this is my activities leading up to Super Bowl LIII. I developed working relationships with representatives of the NFL’s Super Bowl LIII planning committee, state public health officials, state agriculture officials, federal law enforcement agents, state emergency management officials, and the stadium’s catering staff. Additionally, I coordinated with various FSIS offices throughout the pre-event planning and the execution of our activities during the event. This included working with staff in FSIS’s Office of Investigation, Enforcement, and Audit (OIEA) and the Significant Incident Preparedness and Response Staff, who obtained the food samples we tested and helped communicate the coordination of the agency’s activities for the event. FSIS FERN conducted laboratory analysis of FSIS-regulated food products to prevent the outbreak of foodborne illnesses during the event.
Lenore Musick: For our dining halls, we developed a food safety plan for all units and coordinated with our vendors to ensure we were receiving safe product.
For catering, we didn’t have a vast network of people to pull information from about handling a large event like the Super Bowl. So we used our own knowledge from events like Teach for America, Boys & Girls Clubs, and Georgia State University’s homecoming. We fed thousands of people in a short amount of time, so that was a good amount of training. The largest difference was safety-related procedures. For prior events, we used normal food handling practices. But with the Super Bowl being a Tier 1 event, we had to anticipate daily visits from USDA and the health department. The key to success is pre-planning for large events to ensure there is plenty of equipment and personnel available to maintain food safety standards.
Venessa Sims: Georgia had finalized its Food Emergency Response Plan (FERP) in the past year (a multi-year planning process in and of itself). Just when we thought we had completed this multi-agency planning project, we realized that we had not fully encompassed special event planning into the document, and so we had to step back and punt, so to speak, to ensure we more completely encompassed interagency communications, sampling, and laboratory coordination for special events into the document. It was an excellent reminder that the planning process never ends and of the importance of including real-world events and responsibilities in the planning process.
As the director of emergency management and supporter of the Georgia Food and Feed Rapid Response Team (GA RRT), I reached out to the federal ESF [emergency support function] 11 coordinator, Andrew Wilson, who helped obtain planning documents from Super Bowl LII from his network. I was also made aware from our public health partners of a City of Minneapolis webinar by Daniel Huff, environmental health director, Minnesota Public Health Department, where he shared his knowledge and expertise on the subject. I later met him when we copresented at our RRT National Conference in Austin, TX, and he was a plethora of knowledge and real-world planning considerations. Having these planning items helped direct our efforts and helped provide a foundation for our work.
We decided fairly early on that we would incorporate a sampling effort into our food defense operations. Little did I know that this would be a massive undertaking. The coordination of testing efforts for nontraditional threat agents beyond the theoretical planning efforts in the FERP took thoughtful planning and interagency coordination. It included a tour of the Russell Research Center, a USDA-FSIS FERN lab in Athens, GA, to further understand their processes and methodologies, and internal meetings with our two food laboratories within GDA.
The logistical efforts for hot food sampling were more robustly coordinated and created by our operations section chief, Krissa Jones. GDA had a component of the sampling operations during the Super Bowl along with USDA-FSIS. An organizational chart was developed to break the Super Bowl foodservice sites into different zones. GDA had Centennial Olympic Park, and GSU and USDA-FSIS had the Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC), Mercedes-Benz Stadium (MBS), and State Farm Arena. This operational period had a successfully developed and validated plan that included logistical preparations and color-coded coolers. I cannot say enough about Krissa Jones and Chad McCord for their collective effort in developing and implementing this strategy. Though our food safety staff samples on a regular basis, the incorporation of sampling hot food and a validated template was a highlighted success of Super Bowl LIII.
As ESF 11 coordinator in Georgia, I sent a formal request for assistance to the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] and USDA-FSIS FERN leads to support this sampling effort for Super Bowl LIII. I am highlighting this item because special event planning does include formal processes to coordinate response.
The sampling coordination of both GDA and USDA-FSIS took several months of preparation and coordination. There were numerous emails, conference calls, and meetings that took place to prepare for this effort. There were facility site walk-throughs by command and operational staff to familiarize themselves with the locations in advance of the sampling operations. There were discussions regarding delivery methods and implementation to include courier routes with increased traffic and pedestrian foot traffic implications, and road closures as we got closer to game day. There were also discussions during safety briefings about protecting the integrity of the samples in large crowds. GDA sent their samples to GDA labs and USDA-FSIS utilized their labs and the FERN network. Though I have taught about FERN in traceback courses and discussed it at meetings and conferences, as unified commander, it was impressive to see this national asset in action and the timeliness of these capabilities. The FDA Southeast Food and Feed Lab also took part in the response efforts.
This is a quote I utilized in information sharing at the close of the event that summarizes this effort: “A special thanks for the work of our sampling teams and laboratories both here in Georgia and across the nation! This event has highlighted the great work and efforts of the FERN network and the services they provide. I have been impressed to see it all play out and am grateful for this wonderful asset and our own GDA labs, who are also members. We have been able to build our networks and our capabilities in Georgia during Super Bowl LIII all while protecting public health!”
FSM: What logistics were required to carry out these responsibilities? Did you have to allocate more/different personnel/resources to accomplish these tasks?
TB: Internal coordination between FSIS offices is an essential component of success during events such as the Super Bowl. An increase in total FSIS personnel is not necessary per se; however, there may be a need for redistribution of our trained personnel to prepare for and work the event.
LM: For our dining halls, we didn’t really need anything extra; we just had to increase awareness among the staff.
For catering, we added cooler spaces and about 25–30 more people to our team for 2 weeks. The luxury of working in this department is that we can pull assistance from other units. We acquired more vehicles and food-holding equipment. We could only use certain vendors, so we planned daily with our sales reps on items we needed. Our administrative team coordinated with the city on times, pickups, and allergies, and fielded tons of calls throughout the day.
VS: I cannot stress [enough] the importance of logistical planning for this type of event. Not only was it recommended by Chief Woody of the Atlanta Police Department [APD] that I join the Super Bowl Logistics Committee, [but] our internal logistical planning efforts were quite robust as well. Being able to see the larger picture of the overall logistical response helped us in our preparedness endeavors. It also gave us knowledge to prepare for our specified operations. The logistical need for our food defense efforts was detailed and comprehensive. It included operational personnel, vehicles, supplies, PPE [personal protective equipment], hand warmers, sampling supplies, coolers, carts to transport supplies in the field, clipboards, and travel routes, to name a few.
A common thought I like to share when providing National Incident Management System/Incident Command System (NIMS/ICS) trainings is that the logistics are often an afterthought. Logistics is the often less recognized KEY to any response. If you don’t have the people, equipment, and/or supplies on hand to do the job, you don’t have an operation. You cannot conduct the work that must be done because you don’t have the tools to do the job. As we follow the NIMS/ICS structure, logistics is a critical component, and more focus should be given to this key management paradigm to be successful in our planning and operational response activities. NIMS/ICS is like a puzzle: You need all the pieces to get to and appreciate the full picture that you are trying to develop and create.
FSM: Were you prepared for all contingencies on the day of the event? Did you encounter any issues that you weren’t expecting?
TB: FSIS takes its role in these special events seriously and is fully prepared. FSIS surveils and reports the laboratory results for the foods intended for consumption during the big event prior to the event itself. The pre-event sampling, testing, and data reporting are intended to demonstrate the seriousness of an intentional food adulteration and harden the target by having a demonstrable presence of a food defense assessment/sampling/testing/reporting plan associated with each event that FSIS is involved in. These efforts also act as a deterrent for anyone who may consider tampering with the food supply at events.
As a group of federal and state partners, we were prepared, and fortunately no unforeseen circumstances arose during Super Bowl LIII. FSIS was on standby status, prepared to assist the local public health authority and GDA’s RRT, should a food sample need an expedited laboratory analysis for any reason.