MINNEAPOLIS — The Minnesota Twins just scored a major safety award after making changes to stop terrorism. The team has officially earned the SAFETY Act Designation from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The Twins are the 12th team in Major League Baseball to earn this prestigious safety status.
"It's quite an accomplishment,” Vice President of Ballpark Operations Dave Horsman said. “It’s something we as an organization have been working on for six years.”
The SAFETY Act was enacted by Congress in 2002 to provide an accreditation system for public facilities that meet the highest standards for anti-terrorism efforts and safety planning.
"You have to think about a lot of worst-case scenarios, what has happened in other places of the world, what could possibly happen, heck, what you have seen in the movies,” Horsman says.
To achieve this prestigious status ballparks need to install several safety features and upgrades, such as barricades, security gates, and surveillance systems.
However, Horsman said most of the safety improvements they have made in recent years are invisible to fans who visit the ballpark.
“A lot of it is based on how we deploy our law enforcement and security at our games, how we are training, our emergency planning,” Horsman says.
Achieving the SAFETY Act Designation is a great honor, Horsman said, but it’s not a one-time award. He said the designation is all about setting a new safety standard at Target Field that must be maintained every day visitors stop by the ballpark.
“We’re constantly improving and looking for new technology that can improve the safety here at Target Field,” he said.
The next big safety project at Target Field involves replacing the barricades outside of the ballpark. Horsman said the process will take three years to complete.