Stadiums increase budgets, heighten security measures to protect fans - ESPN The Magazine - ESPN
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Industry of fear
It's time to ask: Have all the bag checks and armed guards made us safer or just more aware of the danger?
Updated: September 11, 2011, 9:46 AM ET
By Peter Keating | ESPN The Magazine
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7/10/2014
Stadiums increase budgets, heighten security measures to protect fans - ESPN The Magazine - ESPN
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Photo Illustration by
CJ Burton for ESPN The MagazineThe Department of Homeland Security ranks stadium attack as one of the 12 most devastating possible acts of terrorism.
This story appears in the Sept. 19 issue of ESPN The Magazine.
THE SNIPER WORE a baseball cap. He found a secluded spot on a grandstand near the 20-yard line at the south side of Oklahoma State's Boone Pickens Stadium. He lay flat and planted his assault rifle on its mount. He held the gun tight, peering through its telescopic sight across the field to the opposite corner of the end zone. His heart beat faster, but just a little, for he had released this weapon's charge before. Amid the cheers of 60,000 fans, he squeezed the trigger, then pulled it again and again. And again and again.
As the bullets sped toward their target, a monitor in an RV lit up. The screen flashed a triangular wedge of purple within an image of the stadium's architectural plan. Todd Lamb, the lieutenant governor of Oklahoma, was (inside the RV, surveying this mobile command post. Lamb had played wide receiver for the Cowboys on this field in 1992, back when he ran a 4.5 40 and the stadium was known as Lewis Field. He had protected presidents from assassination as a Secret
Service special agent under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He remembers all too keenly coming home from a walk with his son, who wasn't even 2 years old, in a red wagon on Sept. 11, 2001, to find his pager buzzing with calls straight out of hell. His whole reason for being in public life, his whole reason for being at all, was to prevent the loss of
American life and liberty.
Lamb watched as a second purple sliver flashed, and the point where the two slices intersected began to glow. Security cameras swerved their view to the precise spot where the sniper had launched his shot, identifying the section, row and nearest seat to rushing guards. The whole thing took a little more than 15 seconds.
It was just a drill. The sniper was an FBI agent. The crowd noise screamed through loudspeakers. The bullets were pinpointed, quickly and accurately, by an OSU-developed system called OverSite along with software and sensors made by Raytheon, a defense technology and security company. Oklahoma State scientists incubated OverSite at the
University Multispectral Laboratories (UML), an unconventional-warfare outfit the school launched in 2006. After years of research and millions in taxpayer and private money, OSU tested the project in April, demonstrating its impressive results to Lamb, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin and other policymakers. http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/6936819/stadiums-increase-budgets-heighten-security-measures-protect-fans-espn-magazine 2/12
7/10/2014
Stadiums increase budgets, heighten security measures to protect fans - ESPN The Magazine - ESPN
The heart of the OverSite system is a device that looks like a vacuum cleaner with microphones sticking out of it. It can use acoustic, chemical or nuclear sensors to sniff out virtually any kind of danger in a large space such as a stadium, and communicate with a command center and remote cameras to combat terrorist attacks. It's one example of a new wave
of
