Resilience and emergency planning
Planning is vital to deal with a major incident
Our Resilience department is responsible for a variety of background planning work, all centred around keeping our firefighters working efficiently and effectively when called to an emergency.
This includes the following key activities:
- Logistics. Making the arrangements necessary to keep our firefighters, their vehicles and equipment available and ready to respond to emergency incidents, day and night.
- Gathering intelligence about situations and hazards that our firefighters may encounter at an incident. These are then translated into procedures and detailed technical information to help them deal effectively and safely with emergencies in the future. We collate information from incidents attended and station audits in order to strengthen our procedures and share any relevant lessons learned with colleagues regionally, nationally and overseas. We are responsible for making sure that the Service is compliant with section 7.2d of the Fire & Rescue Services Act 2004.
- Emergency planning. The Fire and Rescue Service is a Category 1 responder, which means that we are likely to be one of the first emergency services called to a major incident. We have specific responsibilities under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 for planning and responding to natural or man-made incidents on a larger scale, eg a train crash or an explosion at an oil refinery. These often involve the Police, ambulance service, local authorities and other partners and we work together on the Nottingham Local Resilience Forum to plan how we will co-ordinate our respective resources to maximum effect and maintain services in the event of a major incident.
- Researching and developing policy, systems and processes. This involves assessing national guidance received as generic risk assessments and bulletins.
- Running the Control Room. Service Control is responsible for receiving calls from the public, sending fire crews to incidents, organising back-up to crews and liaising with other partners such as Police and the ambulance service.
