Crowds, private security expected in Myrtle Beach area for Memorial Day

Grand Strand hoteliers, tourism officials and law enforcement personnel have four days to tweak their plans for the area’s fist big summer weekend, Memorial Day, and to hope that this year’s holiday doesn’t generate the same headlines as last year’s.

One thing’s for sure, said Taylor Damonte, director of the Clay Brittain Jr. Center for Resort Tourism at Coastal Carolina University, they can expect crowds.

“We expect Saturday night to be virtually full,” he said.

That translates to between 200,000 and 400,000 people. The Center’s reckoning is based on 100,000 bedroom equivalents along the Grand Strand, each able to lodge two to four people.

Last year, three people died and seven were injured in seven separate shootings during the weekend, and area government, business and law enforcement officials have developed a plan for heavy police presence along Ocean Boulevard, a driving circuit that will require cruisers to take a 23-mile loop to check out the action more than once, barricades to keep pedestrians out of traffic and cameras for even more eyes on potential miscreants.

But the security won’t stop there as many, if not all, hotels and motels along Ocean Boulevard will have private security during the weekend as well.

“I think every hotel along the Strand is hiring security,” said Rob Ward, manager of Bermuda Sands, which was at the epicenter of one of the shootings where a man died on a hotel balcony.

“It was a street fight,” he said of one incident that was captured by cellphone cameras and posted on the Internet. “It was in front of our building.”

Ward said Bermuda Sands normally hires a security guard for the summer, starting in June, but he’s started a week early and added another guard this year.

Stephen Greene, CEO of the Myrtle Beach Area Hospitality Association, said he too believes many of the Ocean Boulevard hotels will have private security for the weekend.

Normally, he said, some might have hired off-duty police officers, but that won’t be possible this weekend as all will be working or on-call for their regular jobs.

“After last year, we felt it was needed,” said John Lucas, manager of Holiday Sands South, who has hired three security guards to protect customers and their property during the weekend.

Ward said his guards are coming from a local firm and will know how a beach crowd can be rowdy in normal times but when to step in to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand.

Like the guards at Holiday Sands, those at Bermuda Sands will be unarmed.

Many of those in town for the weekend will be attendees or hangers-on of the Atlantic Beach Memorial Day Bikefest, which has been blamed for attracting those who caused the fatal shootings. The suspects are believed to be from the Summerville area and none have been arrested.

Lucas said there will always be a few troublemakers in every large crowd. For the most part, he said, Bikefest attendees are law-abiding and are, like millions of others who come to the area each year, in town for a vacation.

The hotel has motorcycle and trailer parking spaces and a bike washing station.

The problem, as Lucas said, is that no one has taken ownership of Bikefest who can stage events for the bikers outside Atlantic Beach.

“Sometimes, when you’re hanging out [with nothing to do], you tend to do things you wouldn’t normally do,” he said.

Lucas said he had reservations for about half of his rooms for Memorial Day, but believed that was because the hotel requires a minimum of a four-night stay on holiday weekends.

Ward said he’s 70 percent booked and believed all his rooms would be sold by the time the weekend arrives.

This story was originally published May 17, 2015 at 3:50 PM with the headline "Crowds, private security expected in Myrtle Beach area for Memorial Day."