Your safety is a primary concern for the people who work the Bradenton Blues Festival

It was Friday afternoon, about 20 hours before the first guitar chords of the 2017 Bradenton Blues Festival were set to ripple across the Riverwalk, and Johnette Isham was thrilled with the way preparations were going.

“Every year we get better,” said Isham, the executive director of Realize Bradenton, which organizes the festival. “We’re four hours ahead of schedule. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it reduces the stress levels.”

There’s much to be done in preparation for the festival, which is now in its sixth year. It takes about 140 volunteers to run the festival, both beforehand and during the day.

Safety is one of the primary concerns,. There’s a hydraulic stage, courtesy of Mojoe Productions, that can be quickly lowered in case high winds suddenly kick up. A regular stage could collapse, injuring musicians, staff and audience members. Medical personal will be on duty in case someone gets sick or injured, which hasn’t happened often. Bradenton police officers will be on site. (They’re all working on their day off and picking up extra shifts, so they don’t deplete the number of officers patrolling the streets and responding to 911 calls.)

There’s also a private security company, OSA Global, that’s been working the festival every year. Michael Orsini, the president of OSA, said the Bradenton Blues Festival has always been a safe one, and this year’s will be safer than ever. OSA also handles security for the Pittsburgh Pirates and for many major events in this area.

“We’ve been taking precautions since the beginning,” Orsini said. “I really don’t want to tell you the numbers, but we have sufficient numbers of people at the festival. We’ve added to the numbers every year, and we’ve added security measures every year.”

Orsini can’t get into specifics, but he said his company, Realize Bradenton and Bradenton police have been planning for even the remotest and most horrific eventualities they could imagine, including a mass shooting scenario, since the first festival. All of the OSA personnel, all the police and all the Realize Bradenton volunteers know what their role would be in those situations. Isham and another Realize Bradenton representative recently attended a training session on how to deal with emergencies for an event such as the Bradenton Blues Festival.

That hasn’t been done as a reaction to recent mass shootings, Isham and Orsini both said. It has just been done to make the festival as safe as possible.

Of course, they try to reduce the already minimal chance that something like that will happen. The festival only has two public entrances, and OSA has people at both entrances, making sure people don’t take guns or other potentially dangerous items in.

“We always have people with concealed carry permits trying to bring guns in.” Orsisni said. “We tell them they can’t do that.”

This story was originally published December 1, 2017 at 6:52 PM with the headline "Your safety is a primary concern for the people who work the Bradenton Blues Festival."