Although this year’s Super Bowl is more than a week away, the festivities that will bring droves of people to the Houston area have begun. Multiple events across the city are scheduled throughout the week and will culminate with the big game on Sunday, February 5 at NRG Stadium.
Overall, the Houston Visitor’s Center predicts nearly 1 million people will visit the Houston area during the week leading up to the Super Bowl. This influx of people will affect traffic and will require heightened security measures.
To prepare for this large event, Texas Children’s is committed to maintaining a high level of preparedness so that we are ready to adequately respond in the event of an emergency.
Training
Over the past few months Texas Children’s employees have conducted a large scale, multi-agency Mass Casualty Incident exercise, decontamination exercises at Main and West campuses, and created and tested a Family Reception Center Plan in anticipation of the upcoming big game.
Incident Command
Further, throughout Super Bowl week, we have set up the rooms where our Incident Command and Operations Command Centers operate out of so that they we are prepared to respond quickly and efficiently should any threats materialize.
Increased staffing
To support our preparedness efforts, many teams including Emergency Center Nursing, Patient and Family Services and the Kangaroo Crew have special staffing plans in place over the game day weekend. Other teams have created special on-call rotations of team members specifically prepared to respond over Super Bowl weekend.
Parking
The upcoming Super Bowl events scheduled throughout the next week are expected to increase traffic congestion and parking demand throughout the city as well as in the Texas Medical Center. Please allow additional travel time for your commute to and from work during this time. Also, please park in your assigned location to ensure adequate parking is available in our visitor garages for our patients, families and visitors.
Texas Children’s will work with Texas Medical Center to limit parking access in our visitor garages to hospital patients, families, visitors, and after-hours employees.
- Pavilion for Women after-hours employees can continue to park in the PFW/Garage 21 as usual.
- There will be an access change for the non-Pavilion employees who use Clinical Care/Garage 16 for after-hours weekend parking for Super Bowl weekend only. These employees will be allowed to enter the garage from Friday, February 3, at 6 p.m. through Monday, February 6, at 2 a.m. (Current after-hours programming restricts entrance after 4 p.m. on Sundays.)
- All after-hours employees should exit the visitor garages by no later than 8 a.m. on Monday to ensure parking is available for our patients and families.
- After-hours employees also have the option to park in Garage 19, the Meyer North and Meyer South lots and ride the rail to campus.
- During the week before the event Texas Children’s Hospital Shuttle Services may experience some delays due to the increased traffic in the area. The Texas Children’s Hospital Shuttle Services will be following its normal schedule and will not operate.
Emergency Notification System
Please ensure you have updated your personal contact information in MOLI so that you receive all emergency notifications. Click here for detailed instructions on how to sign up and here to learn more about how to respond to a notification when you receive one.
General safety
Because there will be more people in the Houston area, particularly around the Medical Center and downtown, there is a possibility that there will be more people coming to and from our Main Campus buildings. Therefore, we all need to be mindful of surroundings and report anything out of the ordinary to our security team at ext. 4-5400.
Texas Children’s maintains a high level of emergency preparedness at all times, but as you can see extra steps are planned next week to increase our level of preparedness in response to the scope and scale of the event.
If you have any questions, please contact Emergency Management at ext. 4-1237.