Emergencies

Our Emergency Planning Team works to ensure there are emergency plans in place to respond to emergency events.

Major emergencies can happen with little or no warning and have the potential to seriously disrupt the lives of individuals and communities.

A major emergency is something that seriously affects people, buildings or the environment and could include transport accidents, major fire, severe weather such as heavy snow, flooding or high winds and health alerts.

Our Emergency Planning Team ensure there are emergency plans in place. We also work with local communities to help them create their own plans and ensure residents and businesses have the required information before, during and after an event.

Emergency plans

We work closely with Essex County Council, the emergency services and other agencies and neighbouring districts to regularly assess the threats and risks to the communities within the city. This helps us to prepare emergency plans to respond to incidents and help communities recover after an event.

All agencies which are involved in this process are represented on the Essex Resilience Forum (ERF), which acts as a county-wide co-ordinating group.

This involves:

• identifying any potential risks
• assessing the likelihood of an incident occurring
• assessing the severity of its effect
• looking at what we can do to reduce the chances of the incident occurring
• agreeing who does what in response to an incident
• carrying out any necessary training and exercising
• regularly reviewing the plans

Emergency rest centres

One of our biggest roles in a major incident is to provide emergency accommodation.

This could be for people who have been evacuated from their homes or who have been involved in the incident but are uninjured. It could also be for people who cannot access their homes because an incident is in progress.

Rest centres are normally set up in local schools, village halls and sports centres. Facilities will range from simple refreshments to makeshift overnight accommodation as necessary.

For more detailed advice email lauren.warsap@colchester.gov.uk or call 1206 282222.