Incident Management

Things to consider:

• Anticipate – scan the horizon for emerging or changing risks
• Assess – assess risks and set priorities
• Prevent – when and where possible
• Respond – implement the plan, adapt and learn
• Recover – recover to the “new normal”
• This will enable you to Prepare.

A major incident is defined as: An event or situation, with a wide range of serious consequences, which requires special arrangements to be implemented by one or more of the emergency responder agencies.

• Emergency Response – decide what processes are required to deal with the initial incident.
• Incident Management – how will the organisation deal with the business interruption.
• Crisis Management – decide what arrangements are needed to deal with strategic, complex, and unprecedented events.
• Business Continuity – decide what processes are required to ensure critical and urgent business activities can continue to operate. Consider loss of buildings due to evacuation, loss of personnel and loss of equipment, as an example.

Risks, Threats and Hazards

Consider:

• Fire or gas leak
• Terrorism threat
• Structural failures
• Serious crowd-related incidents, e.g., crushing, and antisocial/criminal behaviour
• Public health concerns, e.g., outbreaks of infectious diseases
• Severe weather conditions
• Flooding
• Equipment failure
• Communication system failures
• Data breeches
• Loss of services or utilities failure
• Loss of control point/event control
• Loss of key personnel or disruption to key performances
• Disruption to traffic/transport arrangements
• Supply chain failures.

Please Note: For specific security threats, i.e., terrorism, seek guidance from Security Professionals and Thames Valley Police.

Response

In order to respond to an emergency, a set of command-and-control arrangements will need to be rapidly activated. One method is to use the “Gold – Silver – Bronze” model.

• Gold (or strategic) – serves as strategic overall leadership, with the purpose of Directing.
• Silver (or tactical) – serves as co-ordination of activities as directed by Gold, with the purpose of Co-ordinating.
• Bronze (or operational) – serves to carry out actions at the scene, with the purpose of Doing.

Decisions will need to be made as to which personnel will fall into each category – this should be confirmed before attending the SAG meetings.

Roles and responsibilities must be clearly defined, understood, and communicated.