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• Traffic Incident Management Bulletin

October 2008

Outside of the TIM programme, but highly relevant to incident management, West Mercia Local Resilience Forum (LRF) held an exercising day at Worcester Rugby Club in September. 'Exercise Extend' consisted of a series of mock exercises to test their response when faced with a variety of emergency situations.

The event was funded by the Highways Agency, and used to test their response to dealing with emergency customer welfare following critical incidents on the region's network of motorways and major trunk roads.

This article gives an overview to the exercise and the good practice and learning points that have arisen from it.

Exercise Extend

'Exercise Extend' included members and stakeholders from West Mercia LRF; local emergency services, the military, local authorities and other government bodies, such as the Environment Agency together with the Highways Agency.

Almost 100 delegates attended the exercise, including representatives from Department for Transport, Government Office West Midlands, all of the Local Authorities in the area, (Hereford, Worcestershire, Shropshire and Telford and Wrekin), Red Cross, WRVS, the Fire Service, the Ambulance Service and the Highways Agency Traffic Officer Service.

The exercise was tailored to validate a newly created document, 'West Mercia LRF Generic Evacuation Framework'.  The Framework was written following the 2007 floods in order to benefit from Government guidance and take a local perspective around that guidance.

The Highways Agency also trialled new procedures to meet recommendations made in the Pitt Review into the floods of July 2007, which recommended they work with LRFs to deal with the consequences of flooding, with joint plans to mitigate the effects.

For further information on LRFs, please follow the link.

If you have Flash enabled you can view the interactive Exercise Extend Presentation.

Outcomes from the exercise

The exercise identified a whole host of lessons learned, and good practice, some of these are detailed below:

Good Practice

• The strategic objectives from Gold Command must be clear and concise.
• To enable evacuation to take place, there needs to be a multi-agency response.
• It is imperative that vulnerable people are identified prior to the evacuation.
• Business continuity plans are required by all stakeholders involved in 'flooding response'.
• For each decision made, there must be a full extensive log of how a responder came to that decision.

Lessons Learned

• Great value can be taken from knowing Silver and Gold partners and then capitalising on 'pooled experience'.
• During incidents it is important that Category 2 responders are involved as soon as practical/anticipated.
• For Emergency Customer Welfare; evacuation only to be used as a last resort.

How did the exercise go?

Howard Owen, head of the Highways Agency network resilience team that worked alongside West Mercia LRF to organise the day, explained:

"The exercise was designed so we could test our procedures for dealing with serious incidents on the motorways, working alongside our partners.  West Mercia was, with Gloucestershire, one of the areas most affected by the floods of last year. Our partners had developed some new plans and arrangements based on that experience, and we sought to test and validate our Emergency Customer Welfare Policy and learn from their experience."

Lian McKay, a Highways Agency operations manager, who attended the event to represent the Traffic Officer Service, said:

"This exercise gave us a fantastic opportunity to test our emergency plans for adverse incidents and learn from each other.  We ran through several scenarios such as a major road traffic accident closing the motorway and severe flooding.  One thing I shall take away from the event is how vital it is to communicate fully with all our partners to ensure we all achieve our mutual objective."

Chief Constable of West Mercia Constabulary, Paul West, said that this was a "landmark" event for the LRF in that area.

"Our collective response to the unprecedented levels of flooding affecting Herefordshire, Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin and Worcestershire last year was efficient, effective and professional.

However there are always lessons that we can learn from our experience and this exercise was a good opportunity to fine tune our response so we are even more prepared to respond to civil contingencies and keep the communities in West Mercia safe and well while minimising the disruption caused by events, many of which are outside our ability to control."

Has this article been worthwhile reading? Why not take a moment to send us your comments, thoughts, or questions. Please email TIMBulletin@highways.gsi.gov.uk