Several departments are working under one roof around the clock to keep attendees safe and traffic moving around downtown.
AUSTIN, Texas — With hundreds of thousands of visitors in Austin for South by Southwest, city officials are working behind the scenes to keep the festival running safely and smoothly.
KVUE got a look inside the city’s Event Operations Center (EVOC), where multiple departments are working together to monitor crowds, traffic and potential emergencies throughout the festival.
The center activated on the festival’s opening day last Thursday and will operate through Wednesday, the final day of SXSW.
Officials say the EVOC functions as a scaled-down version of Austin’s Emergency Operations Center, bringing key agencies together in one room to coordinate responses if something goes wrong.
“Dispatch is in there, which is one of the main things, but we’re watching the weather, we’re watching the traffic, trying … doing whatever we can to make sure that we’re ready for any incident that might happen,” said David Wiechmann, public information and marketing program manager for Austin Emergency Management.
Inside the operations center are staff members from Austin’s public safety agencies, along with the Transportation Department, Public Works and code enforcement.
When there’s no emergency, those teams still play a key role in managing the flow of the festival and everyday city life around it.
“They’re there to kind of monitor traffic – if they need to extend traffic lights or have the crosswalks last longer before the light turns green so people can get across the street,” Wiechmann said. “They’re kind of monitoring to keep an eye on and help with traffic flow.”
Code enforcement officers are also monitoring venues for potential crowd-control issues or locations that exceed capacity.
City officials say the operations center is particularly important this year because of changes to SXSW. With the Austin Convention Center demolished, festival events are spread across a larger footprint downtown. At the same time, the overlap of the interactive, film and music portions of the festival means more late-night events and crowds.
The operations center runs daily from 10 a.m. until 3 a.m., with staff on call outside those hours.
In addition to traffic and crowds, officials say they’re also closely watching the weather, since extreme heat, cold or high winds can quickly become safety concerns for large crowds.
Even for people not attending SXSW, the city says the coordinated effort can help make navigating street closures and heavier traffic a little easier.