Emergency Planning is the general term for the work that the Government, Emergency Services, Local Authorities, the Health Services and other organisations carry out in preparing plans and procedures for responding to, dealing with and recovering from any incident/emergency.
In the event of any incident requiring the assistance of Islington Council, the Emergency Services will contact the Council by way of an agreed procedure.
The role of the council is then to:
- support the emergency services
- support people affected by the incident
- provide mutual aid to other responders
- maintain normal Council services
- plan for medium and long term consequences and recovery from the incident
The type of assistance that can be offered is the provision of:
- transportation
- rest centres
- examination of building structures
- highway closures and diversion routes
- specialist equipment
- welfare/support
Once the immediate life-threatening period has passed, the council will play a major role in restoring normality to the area as quickly as possible.
Under the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Council has the duty to provide and maintain robust and resilient contingency plans. The purpose of the contingency plans (crisis response plans) is to provide staff with plans, procedures and information they will require to enable them to mitigate the effects of any major emergency occurring within Islington, whilst allowing council services to continue to provide their usual day to day services as far as possible.
The Crisis Response plan, details how the council will respond to an emergency and details roles and responsibilities for each department to ensure a coordinated response. The plan is designated to enable mobilisation of resources, at short notice, in response to any incident in addition to ensuring that core critical services are maintained in the event of major disruption.
A major incident is defined as: A major incident is any emergency that requires the implementation of special arrangements by one or all of the emergency services and will generally include the involvement, either directly or indirectly of large numbers of people.