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What is Emergency Planning?


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What does Emergency Planning mean to you? To some it conjures up a picture of someone sitting at a desk waiting for emergencies to happen. Some have never heard of it and others think we are the service that deals with giving planning permission for building houses.

Emergencies happen frequently on the Island – traffic incidents, fires, etc – but the Emergency Planning Team aren’t necessarily always involved. We step in to assist, when events happen that are beyond the capacity of the emergency services to deal with unaided and we co-ordinate the local authority response. We can help with things like specialist equipment, evacuation, housing and emergency feeding, extra manpower. We can’t always provide the resource ourselves, but generally ‘we know someone who can’.

Emergency Planning is a means of assessing the threats and risks to the Island and putting plans in place to respond to an incident and assist in the recovery.


So, what do we do?


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Well, the response to any major incident will inevitably be multi-agency and could involve the Emergency Services, Public Services, Military, Voluntary Agencies, Industry, Local Authority – which of course includes us – and a host of other organisations within the public and private sector.

The success of the response will depend to a great degree on how we all work together at times of extreme pressure. We therefore need to form good relationships across the board and continually plan, train, exercise, consult and laise/network across both the Island and mainland, to ensure the most appropriate, co-ordinated and effective response to any incident is provided.

The Team provides a Duty Officer 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, who is responsible for activating key Council staff - advising them of appropriate measures to take, assisting throughout the incident and into the recovery phase.

Whatever the incident, the role of the Council is always to provide support and care to the Island community and the environment, and to get things back to normality as soon as possible.


What type of incidents do we get involved in?


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We have assisted in dealing with a wide range of incidents such as:

  • Suspect Packages/Explosive Devices
  • Disposal of dead whales/porpoises
  • Foot and Mouth outbreak
  • Chemical canisters washed ashore
  • Oil/Chemical/Diesel spills
  • Asbestos incidents
  • Flooding
  • Fuel Crisis
  • Evacuation of people from their homes
  • Landslip
  • Incidents involving schoolchildren
  • Suspected SARS outbreak on the Island

How can we help?


We can do this in a variety of ways.

  • Open our Emergency Control Room
  • Co-ordinate the Local Authority and Voluntary Sector response
  • Liaise with outside agencies ie Emergency Services, utilities, military etc
  • Provide support to the Emergency Services
  • Arrange for rest centres to be opened, equipped and staffed
  • Arrange for the provision of food and welfare support within the rest centre
  • Organise contact with a Translation Service if required
  • Organise extra communication links
  • Organise transport
  • Provide information to the public and set up help-lines, if required
  • Responding to the press and opening a Media Briefing Centre, if necessary
  • Organise the setting up of a Temporary Mortuary

The Emergency Planning Team is a good information source and can offer a wide range of advice and guidance. We also have an extensive Resources Database containing information ranging from Air Transport to Weather.
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