Resilience and emergencies

The Emergency Management Team is made up of senior managers from Services who may be involved in dealing with emergencies. The EMT is led by the council's Contingency Planning Adviser Ken Wratten.

Emergencies are random events that occur with little or no advance warning and their causes, whether man-made or natural, are wide ranging. Their scale and consequences are unpredictable but regardless of their cause and location they share some common features in their potential to affect public wellbeing and disrupt the infrastructure and services that support the activities of day-to-day life.

In preparing for emergencies we work in partnership with emergency services, the NHS, the voluntary sector and others to create an awareness and understanding of the contribution each partner can make in resolving the challenges emergencies present.

In a time of emergency, our primary concern lies in assuring the safety and welfare of those affected and achieve this by:

• providing emergency support to the community, for example, shelter, transport, information, and advice
• restoring and, if necessary, supplementing council services that have been disrupted
• providing technical advice, labour, transport, equipment, premises, and any other material or specialist resources that may be required
• taking the lead role in coordinating community recovery issues in the longer term