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TTC preps for Pan Am by rehearsing emergency response
TTC staff know things will go wrong during the Pan Am Games. But transit officials are determined the system will rise to the occasion.

thestar.com
July 6, 2015
By Tess Kalinowski

It's fainting weather on the TTC - 35 degrees Celsius - and the morning rush has barely begun. Transit officials are staring down a list of potential service snags - a parade along King St. that may or may not spill into the road and obstruct streetcars, a protest at King and Bay - and, there's an overturned oil tanker near the Kipling subway station.

A quick, co-ordinated plan would be essential to keep the system moving any day. But this scenario is playing out during the Pan Am Games. The crowds will be larger and full of people who don't normally take transit - and the TTC has something to prove.

With recent system outages fresh in commuters' minds, transit officials know there are a lot of people who expect the TTC will fail under the stress of the Games.

Transit CEO Andy Byford insists they're prepared, with extra staff and vehicles ready to respond to service disruptions.

But there's another crew of transit supervisors, controllers, station managers and frontline experts who will be standing by to decide when and how best to deploy those extra resources.

Three dozen TTC supervisors, controllers, station managers, security and enforcement officers have been gathering to rehearse their response to the emergency scenarios that could pop up during the Games.

From 8 a.m. to noon - no breaks - they run through a binder full of fraught situations, many based on real-life events - from the mundane to the dramatic, from escalator and signal failures to bomb threats.

"Things are going to go wrong," TTC chief customer officer Chris Upfold tells them. But it's not the system failures people remember. "When things go wrong, what transit authorities get criticized for is the response," he says.

"No matter how many redundancies we put in place, those things will fail," says Upfold, who worked for the London Underground until 2011, when it was preparing for the 2012 Olympics. Station management - telling crowds of people how to get where they're going - is critical, he says. But the TTC has amassed an army of more than 1,500 staff who will volunteer at least three shifts each as station ambassadors.

"We will have people at our disposal to help our customers," he says to the employees gathered at the Wilson subway yard. Maps of the Games Transit Network and TTC routes serving Pan Am venues have been posted around the training room.

As pep-talks go, this one delivers a larger-than-average dose of reality. But there's a measure of comfort too, because the main message is that the challenges will be shared.

"We can sometimes get into a siege mentality at the TTC, where you feel like you're all alone and you have to solve it yourself. What I keep saying is, 'You're not alone.' There's lots of people to call," he said.

"Part of the purpose for the event is not only to practise what might happen and our response to it, but to build relationships between people who are going to have to work together during emergencies."

Many of the transit experts training at Wilson will be in their respective divisions and stations. Some will be part of a TTC command co-ordination centre, upstairs from the control centre that monitors all subway movements.

"We've been five years of planning, much more intensely over the last year," said Upfold.

"Normally we plan our transit service so we are right to the bone. This is our opportunity to show what we can do when we're not running transit at that knife edge of ability to deliver."

Emergencies the TTC has prepared to handle

As part of its Pan Am Games preparations, staff from all TTC divisions have been rehearsing how to respond and communicate during emergencies. The scenarios include routine collisions, traffic obstructions and breakdowns. Here are some of the more dramatic situations, TTC controllers, station managers and supervisors have been discussing: