A major special event in your jurisdiction - a marathon, a concert series, a political rally, a festival - will generate an incident action plan. It will have an incident commander. It will have a logistics section, a communications plan, and a detailed map of staging areas. The field agencies will rehearse their response. Mutual aid will be pre-positioned.
The comm center will get a briefing memo. Maybe a meeting. Maybe just an email with the IAP attached.
And then, when the event produces a critical incident, the dispatch center - the single point through which every 911 call, every resource request, and every mutual aid activation flows - will be expected to perform flawlessly with preparation that amounts to "read the attached document."
Route 91 and the special events pre-planning failure
On October 1, 2017, a mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas killed 60 people and wounded 411. The after-action report documented 93 recommendations. Many of them traced back to pre-planning failures that directly affected the comm center: the CAD system froze under the volume of simultaneous entries, radio channels saturated within minutes, and dispatchers were processing calls for an incident that was producing more information than any single position could handle.
The event had a special events plan. The comm center was part of it - on paper. But the gap between "included in the plan" and "operationally prepared for a mass casualty during the event" was enormous.
What event pre-planning looks like from the dispatch console
The comm center's pre-planning needs are different from the field's. The dispatcher doesn't need to know where the medical tent is. The dispatcher needs to know what happens when the medical tent is overwhelmed and field units start self-dispatching. The dispatcher needs to know the talk group assignments, the mutual aid channel plan, the threshold for activating the backup dispatch center, and who has authority to open additional radio channels.
The dispatcher needs to have practiced the scenario where 47 calls come in at once, all reporting the same incident, and none of them agreeing on what's happening. That scenario isn't theoretical. It's the first three minutes of every mass casualty event.
The fix is inclusion, not information
Sending the comm center a copy of the IAP is information. Including the comm center in the tabletop exercise is inclusion. Having dispatchers participate in the pre-event walkthrough - even if it's just a supervisor attending the planning meeting and bringing back the operational questions - is inclusion.
The Boston Marathon bombing killed three people and injured 264. The comm center handled it with precision because Boston EMS had been running tabletop exercises for that exact scenario for years. The dispatchers knew the communications plan because they'd practiced it. Not read it. Practiced it.
The difference between Route 91 and Boston wasn't resources or talent. It was preparation.