Olympic Security

The Sydney Morning Herald has a Story on security in the Olympics, and how A$1.5 Billion was spent on it. According to the article, they had “12 patrol boats, 4000 vehicles, 9 helicopters, four mobile command centres, and a blimp.” This is very little. 9 helicopters is nothing believe me. I had six to play with during Sydney, and there was little we could do with them.

Now it can be reported how poor security was in Sydney. The picture on the right is actually at the Auburn McDonalds at about 6:30AM during the Sydney Olympics. The motorcycles are actually Police Motorcycles. I love to call this the “Police Car Pool”. Of course the police need to eat, but I love this photo.

For those that do not know the geography, this is about 5 km from the olympic stadium.

I was based at Auburn Hospital in one of their other buildings. This is on the top of a hill in sydney. With the scaffolding on the roof anyone within about 5km could see the building depending on the local terrain. On the photo to the left you might notice that there is some scaffolding on the top of the turret. That is where we had people, and we had antennas on the top of the roof.

Not exactly what you would call a normal Olympic building, neither new nor old. This building was built about 50 years before just post war probably, using bricks from what is not the Olympic Park.

Security for the site was sort of poor. The door is shown below. Notice how the door is open. That was normal. Well, there is a glass door just inside, but that was only locked some of the time. Then you just needed to take the stairs or lift up stairs. This was a case of security through obscurity. No guards and good parking. It would have been a real problem if this site had been lost, and even worse if they had done some more at UNSW at the same time.

It is assumed that our six helos could be used if needed to do some emergency work, and were just before the closing start of the mens marathon. We had arranged refueling at North Head, and once one of our helos took off, it spotted a boat on fire about 5KM off shore. So, the pilot contacted Air Traffic Control, and the cameraman sent the pictures to us.

But only to us. So I fed the images back to the IBC, and then it went arround the world on the news. Actually I have not seen the news reports but I heard about it later. And it was a great feeling to know I had helped.