Community emergency plans

Emergency planning guidance enabling community groups to provide more effective support.

Why is community emergency planning important?

Our emergency services will always have to prioritise those in greatest need during an emergency, especially where life is in danger.

Individuals and communities may need to rely on their own resources to ensure they are able to cope.

Experience has shown that those who have spent time planning and preparing for this are better able to cope, and recover more quickly.

Community emergency planning enables groups to provide more effective support. It also provides information to responding agencies (emergency services, local authority etc.) in coordinating the response on a wider scale.

How to develop a community emergency plan

Oxfordshire County Council has produced Oxfordshire Community Emergency Planning guidance, with a plan template, and we provide an example plan for information.

Simple community emergency plans are designed to achieve the following:

Identification of safe places to use as a refuge for people displaced from their homes in the short term (hours) and how to open them at short notice at any time. These are known as ‘Survivor Reception Centres’ by emergency services and it would help if this terminology could be used in your plan.
Identification of people that can and are willing to help in an emergency.
Identification of equipment that might be useful for self-help in an emergency
Identification of vulnerable or potentially vulnerable people in the community
A list of useful contacts for use in a crisis.

A number of communities have already produced their own plans for specific emergencies; flood plans developed with the Environment Agency being the most notable example.

In most cases the information compiled in the development of these plans would be useful in a number of different emergency scenarios and we recommend that you consider the production of a general emergency plan.

Where communities have particular vulnerabilities, for example, flooding or are cut off in snow, additional information may be useful in the form of an annex to the plan.

What to do when you have developed your plan

Complete a short form (doc format, 35 KB) for submission to Oxfordshire County Council Emergency Planning. This information may be used to inform the emergency services. It will be shared with emergency planners in the District councils but it will not be shared with members of the public.
Run through the plan by ‘what if’ possible emergencies in the community. See our handy validation checklist (pdf format, 11 KB).
Hold a table-top exercise to validate the plan (the Emergency Planning Unit can help you).

Emergency planning - a community approach

Oxfordshire County Council, Oxfordshire district councils and the Environment Agency co-operated to run a series of events in September and October 2011 aimed at parish and town councils. The events took the form of five short presentations which are available for viewing below, together with additional information that might prove useful in developing plans.