THE CHALLENGE
Delivering a ground-breaking, boundary-defying, world-record-breaking festival – the largest in the Middle East – each year since 2021, while facilitating huge civil works, permanent works and temporary works in the desert in Saudi Arabia.
The Solution
As members of the Masterplanning Team, we work on an ongoing basis as the client’s Health & Safety partner.
We provide year-round support & consultancy on all matters relating to Crowd and Event Safety.
We provide an on-site Safety Team, as required. Some years this has been for a total period of 5 – 6 months. The team size increases in line with activity on site, level of risk associated with that activity and other key factors. We work through all phases – Civils Phase, Commissioning Phase, Build Phase, Show Days, Break Phase.
Bridey and co. implement our full Digital Operations programme for Soundstorm, providing online Inductions in multiple languages, linking with our offline Inductions delivery as well as QR-code based incident reporting, compliance tracking and custom dashboard provision for various stakeholders.
We develop Plans and Procedures for presentation to Civil Defense along with our 3rd-party engineer partner and liaise directly with them around securing the permit for the show.
3 – 4 of our Leadership Team occupy Tactical / Silver roles in Event Control during Show.
The Result
Up to 750,000 people each year enjoy programming across 9 stages on one of the world’s largest custom-built festival sites.
There are not too many shows in the world that are on this scale.
Soundstorm is the biggest show in the Middle East every year and is well established now on the global festival and event calendar. It is almost unmatched, with respect to complexity and sheer size.
On a footprint outside of Riyadh, KSA, and with the site measuring approximately a 5.3sq km, the jewel in the crown at Soundstorm is the record-breaking Big Beast stage, measuring 250m in width and 41.2m in height.
Each year’s iteration of this show develops and builds on previous years. It has included everything from attendee zip lines crossing the site through to fire gardens, Metallica performing on Big Beast through to drones launching fireworks, the world’s most considered and impressive VIB offering through to permanent highways and bridges being built and so much more.
Our Part
Mark in here has been Senior Health & Safety Director for MDLBEAST events since 2021.
Services we provide include:
- Presence on the Masterplanning Team
- Health & Safety Strategy development
- Crowd & Event Safety consultancy
- Safety by Design consultancy
- Civil Defense / Authorities liaison
- Operational Team deployment
- Tactical Command provision
- Stakeholder management
- Vendor management