At APCO 2016, Stephen Willoughby and Craig Gwynne of the Richmond (Virginia) Department of Emergency Communications outlined how they prepared the city of Richmond for the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) World Championship Bicycle Race, a massive, multi-day bicycle race that drew half a million spectators.

To prepare for the race, the Richmond Department of Emergency Communications was created from three departments in July 2014. Willoughby, who was new to the Richmond area, wanted to iron out an extensive plan without alienating any of the city’s emergency centers and agencies.

“Being the new guy and not wanting to step on anyone’s toes, I wondered how I could implement communications for the race,” Willoughby said.

“There was a lot of different planning, but most of the comm centers wanted to treat it like a smaller bike race that occurred the previous year. Craig and I pulled leadership from different departments to coordinate communications. That was the first-ever meeting where all these sectors got together.”

Gwynne, a supervisor for the city of Richmond, became the communications unit leader for UCI and worked closely with Willoughby. They made a coordinated effort of closing roadways, opening them back up and closing them again if needed. There were more than 7,800 public safety personnel watching out for staff, accountability and injuries.

“We established an incident command center,” Willoughby said. “I walked into the command post we set up and noticed all of the firefighters were up front and police were in the back, not really interacting with each other. It became a break room for some people. The original organization of the room was set up for pets, so cats and dogs were split up. We had to get everyone really working together for this command center to work.”

Gwynne described the process of setting up an effective command center, including the creation of a planning team called the UCI Incident Management Team that set up multiple meetings, the establishment of interoperability among 60 agencies of various levels, the formation of an incident dispatch team and the use of a cloud-based, light-weight CAD system that was used at the Burning Man music festival in Nevada.

“As the team developed, rank and patches didn’t really have anything to do with how we operated,” Gwynne said. “We had to figure out a way to make sure everyone communicated effectively. We wanted to be able to manage resources all on the same platform.”

Ultimately, Willoughby and Gwynne said that their success working the UCI was due to inclusion in the planning process, strong relationships with partners and credibility. “Having good relationships in this team was huge,” Gwynne said.