Emergency Planning Overview

The Major Emergency Plan

The Emergency Planning Section's primary responsibility is to ensure that the City Council has a robust and resilient 'Major Emergency Plan'. This is to ensure that the City Council can respond promptly and appropriately to any major incident which occurs within the city or which has an impact on the city.

The Major Emergency Plan prepares for, and deals with, a range of major incidents, for example:

• major transport accidents
• chemical release
• crowd problems at public arenas
• diseases and epidemics
• major fires
• building collapse
• flooding
• terrorist activities
• gas explosions
• severe weather

The Emergency Planning Team co-ordinates the planning, training, exercising, activation, and the management of the City Council's response to emergencies i.e. the Major Emergency Plan.

The team works in partnership with:

• the Emergency Services
• Voluntary Agencies
• a range of other Agencies who have a role to play in emergency response

This partnership approach is to ensure there is a co-ordinated, effective and speedy response to any incident.

 

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Assessing Risks

The Emergency Planning Section has prepared and maintains a Manchester Community Risk Register.  This details the range and severity of foreseeable threats/incidents which the city may face, and to which the City Council may have to respond.

 

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Prepare and Maintain Plans

The Section maintains the City Council's 'Major Emergency Plan' and also develops and maintains specific plans for:

• foreseeable specific threats (e.g. flooding)
• response activities which are common to a range of major incidents (e.g. Reception centres, Transport).   

Since emergency incidents take no heed of administrative boundaries, the Emergency Planning team works closely with:

• Emergency Planners in neighbouring Local Authorities
• Emergency Services
• Utilities
• Regulatory Agencies
• Facility Owners/Managers
• Voluntary agencies

This is to to ensure that our plans are compatible and co-ordinated.   The Emergency Planning Team also develop and maintain appropriate multi-agency plans for the City and contribute to various county-wide plans.

 

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Training, Events and Emergency Exercises

To ensure that the City Council's plans, personnel and resources are "fit for purpose", Emergency Planning Officers are involved in training people who have roles within the plan and exercising/validating the various plans.

Together with partner organisations, we try to ensure a strong capability to respond to emergency incidents with a consistent and well-managed approach.

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Providing the City Council Response to Emergency Incidents

When an incident is notified to the City Council, our Emergency Planning Officers are the first point of contact, via the Council's 24-hour emergency line. 

The Emergency Planning Officer call-out list ensures that there is an availability to respond to major emergency calls from the Emergency Services 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

An Emergency Planning Officer will activate and co-ordinate an appropriate City Council response to emergency incidents.

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Debriefing

After an incident, the various responder organisations review the incident through an internal debrief.  This is so that we can improve our performance in the future.  The debrief can help to identify:

• key learning points
• changes to procedures/roles
• the appropriateness of resources
• further training needs

Where necessary, a multi-agency debrief can be initiated by any of the responder organisations.  The debrief session will review certain aspects of the multi-agency arrangements so that they can be refined and improved.

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