The work of the resilience forum in Thames Valley follows a simple cycle with each phase of the cycle leading into the next. Each emergency response effort leads into an assessment of what didn’t go as well as it could have as well as building on what did go well, this kicks off the next planning and preparation phase.
MITIGATION
- Understanding the risks, how they are caused and what impact they would have locally.
- Working in partnership to reduce the likelihood of the risk occurring and lessen the impacts if the risk should occur.
PREPAREDNESS
- Understanding the impacts and consequences.
- Developing contingency plans for response to the risks.
- Matching our capabilities to the needs of each emergency.
- Developing longer-term recovery plans.
- Awareness of each organisation roles and responsibilities.
- Training and exercising.
- Lessons learned from previous incidents.
- Developing incident management procedures.
- Establishing links for help and assistance from other counties for lengthy/wide scale incidents.
RESPONSE
- Initial emergency activities (public safety, evacuation and shelter, limiting the spread of the incident, search and rescue).
- Initial damage assessment.
- Multi-agency command and control.
- Warning and informing the public.
RECOVERY
- Initial and long-term recovery efforts.
- Rehousing of displaced people.
- All recovery activities are based around
4 key areas:
- Humanitarian assistance
- Infrastructure (roads, water, sewer, power, communications, etc.)
- Economic
- Environmental