2.1 Using your Plan

When an emergency happens, you will need to know how best to use your Plan and volunteers.

You will have made your local emergency responders aware of your Plan as part of your planning process – and agreed how they will contact you, and how you should contact them - so it may be that you will activate your Plan in response to a call from the emergency responders. It is important that any actions which you carry out are coordinated with the wider emergency responders’ efforts. 

In some circumstances, the emergency responders may be unable to contact you. Therefore, you should develop a series of triggers you can use as a Community Emergency Group to decide whether to take action, agreed in advance with your local authority.

For example:

• Have we been able to contact our local emergency responders?
• What messages are being put out in the media?
• What can we do safely without the help of the emergency responders?

What to do when you put your plan into action

Using your list of skills, people and resources, you will need to decide what you can do to work safely with the emergency responders in the immediate response to an emergency event, and a potentially long period of recovery.

2.2 Your first Community Resilience Group meeting

It may be possible for your group to meet briefly once the Plan has been activated. If so, an example of a draft agenda you can use for the first meeting can be found in the templates at the end of this document. The draft agenda is intended to be a guide only. You may find that your team and volunteers are already getting on with helping but it is important to make sure everyone is safe and working in a coordinated way. 

2.3 Evacuation

During the initial response to an emergency, it might be necessary for some members of your community to be evacuated from their homes to a safe place. Speak to those coordinating the response (normally the police) to see what role your group can play in this.

You may be able to assist with tasks such as:

• door knocking or delivery of emergency messages;
• looking after people in a place of safety; or
• identifying those who may need extra help to move to safety.

2.4 Communications

Your group should discuss how it will cope if communications are disrupted in the area, and how to do this without putting anyone at risk. For example:

Community information hubs 

Having a central meeting place or information hub, such as a notice board, to share and gather information could be a useful addition to your communication plans. 

Communication chain

Neighbours can form a simple communication chain to pass on messages, or your group could consider door knocking as an option to communicate with local people and get the emergency responders’ messages across.

Radio 

As well as receiving information via national and local radio stations, you may also have access to walkie-talkies or amateur radio groups like the Radio Amateurs’ Emergency Network (RAYNET), or other radio amateurs, that you can use to communicate with each other.

Satellite internet

This works by bouncing signals off satellites rather than relying on ground-based infrastructure. There are monthly costs for any satellite internet services and you would need back up power generation such as a portal power generator to enable the system to work in a power outage.