Raleigh didn’t heed vehicle, driver screening guidance before deadly Christmas parade

After a train slammed into a Texas veterans’ parade in 2012, killing four people and injuring a dozen more, the National Transportation Safety Board urged local governments to overhaul the protections for parade-goers and participants.

Chief among its recommendations: requiring parade organizers to submit a written safety plan that includes, among its essential components, provisions for driver and vehicle screening.

The city of Raleigh, now grappling with its own parade tragedy, didn’t follow that advice.

Its special event guidelines say event organizers must turn in an emergency action plan. But nowhere in the city’s parade permit ordinance, policy, guidelines or plan template is there any mention of screening drivers or vehicles.

“The City does not set safety guidelines for events of this nature,” spokeswoman Sarah Baker told The News & Observer in response to the newspaper’s request for documents describing the safety standards that applied Saturday’s Christmas parade.

Neither police nor fire officials inspected the vehicles or floats that participated, department spokesmen said.

Police have identified faulty brakes as the “proximate cause of death” for an 11-year-old dancer killed at the parade.

They charged Landen Christopher Glass, a 20-year-old who previously danced with the same troupe, with several misdemeanors and traffic infractions.

Glass, who the warrant says works on car safety systems, towed a float for CC & Co. Dance Complex with a GMC pickup that had several after-market alterations.

He has a lengthy history of driving infractions, including skipped inspections, in his home state of Virginia, The News & Observer previously reported.

The city’s investigation of what went wrong “will include a comprehensive evaluation of the City’s current guidelines and review of State safety recommendations regarding parades and special events,” Julia Milstead, another spokeswoman for the city of Raleigh, said in an emailed statement Wednesday.

She earlier referred questions about vehicle and driver screening to the parade’s organizer, Shop Local Raleigh, which did not answer the N&O’s emailed questions.

“The Greater Raleigh Merchants Association team is heartbroken over the tragic events that occurred on Saturday,” Jennifer Martin, executive director of the association that runs Shop Local Raleigh, said in a written statement. “We are actively assisting the Raleigh Police Department’s investigation and as such, we are not in a position to comment further at this time.”

Shop Local Raleigh submitted the required emergency action plan to the city, Milstead said, but an N&O request for the plan and city staff’s feedback has yet to be fulfilled.

Best-practice recommendations

The single page of guidelines that lays out Raleigh’s requirements for event-related emergency plans asks organizers to detail how they will respond to severe weather, medical emergencies, evacuations and any “special hazards.”

It says plans for large-scale events must be “extensive.”

But neither the city’s guidelines nor the template it has posted online ask organizers to address all the elements the NTSB said were must-haves.

The federal agency identified those crucial ingredients as “risk mitigation and contingency planning, with provisions for communication among event participants and other stakeholders; safety briefings for event participants and other stakeholders; driver and vehicle screening; safe float operation; and notification of railroads or other entities with control over possible hazards.”

Raleigh’s guidelines focus on the first item in the list. They are silent on the rest.

Other best practices for local governments go beyond the NTSB’s 2013 recommendations.

Following the federal agency’s call to action, the National Association of Counties, the National League of Cities and the International City/County Management Association together drafted a document listing what they consider “critical elements.”

They also recommended that written plans provide for vehicle and driver screening and suggested that police had a role to play too.

Law enforcement officers should provide “guidance to determine minimum age and other safety requirements or training for drivers, especially those that are pulling the extra length and load of a large float,” the associations said.

When asked about whether the Raleigh Police Department provided parade safety guidance to organizers, Lt. Jason Borneo said only, “RPD provides security support for Raleigh Christmas parades.” He referred questions about parade policies to Shop Local Raleigh.

‘It could have been so much worse’

Ira David Wood III had concerns about the parade floats and tow vehicles even before the pickup truck driver lost control.

The seats on the float that Shop Local Raleigh supplied to his theater company, Theatre in the Park, were made of wood so spongy and unstable that performers decided they had to stand, he said.

The truck that had been provided to pull the float wasn’t shiny and new as it had been in years past, Wood said. It had three paint colors and what looked like an after-market lift.

Theatre in the Park was assigned the 26th position in the parade, just ahead of CC & Co. Dance Complex.

As the float approached the ABC11 viewing stand, a cameraman climbed aboard to film Scrooge, played by Wood’s son.

The first sign that something had gone terribly wrong was when the journalist lowered his camera and said, “Oh my God,” looking past the end of the float down Hillsborough Street, Wood said.

An adult on the float told everyone to get down, assuming the commotion was about an active shooter.

That’s when Wood, who was walking behind the float, heard a sound that recalled a locomotive, a horn and what he thought were grinding gears.

He could see the driver waving out the window and yelling.

Wood and a choreographer ushered performers out of the truck’s path.

Then the theater company float, which had continued moving, started to pitch violently from side to side.

The actor playing Christmas Present nearly fell over the edge, he said.

In the days since, Wood has tried to focus on helping his performers channel the experience into healing.

He keeps coming back to one thought: “As tragic as it was, it could have been so much worse.”

Wood has complained to parade organizers about the quality of the floats in past years, he said, for things like rotten wood or the balance being off, leaving the float listing to the side.

“We usually put young performers, the kids, on the float, so they don’t have to walk, and then our featured performers, Scrooge and the Christmas ghosts, are always on the float,” he said. “So the safety of the float, obviously, is very important to us.”

Theatre in the Park has participated in the parade for decades.

“In the past,” he said, “when we’ve had a situation that we thought, ‘OK, you can do a little better here with the quality of the float and the safety of the float,’ we’ve let it be known to the people running everything.”

Unanswered questions

In past years, the parade’s organizers worked primarily with two float companies that provided drivers, said John Odom, who for many years helped plan the event. He is no longer closely involved.

The current arrangement is unclear.

The merchants’ association’s website says that it “provides floats for all float entries,” but the online application also provides an option to provide your own float, subject to the organizer’s approval.

Through a spokesperson, CC & Co. Dance Complex owner Christy Curtis did not answer questions about whether her company used its own float in the parade or rented one.

“Our focus is on supporting our CC & Company dancers and their families as they grieve and heal,” Curtis said in an emailed statement to the N&O Tuesday. She referred future inquiries to city and police officials.

Other Triangle cities are moving quickly to quell the possibility of another tragedy.

Durham already required floats in its holiday parade to be pulled by City of Durham vehicles and operated by qualified and licensed city staff, a parks and recreation manager said.

And this year, The News & Observer previously reported, city vehicles participating in the parade will be inspected within a week of the event.

Cary announced that police and fire officials will inspect cars and trailer brakes before that city’s parade.