As part of its local Resilience Forum, Gateshead Council coordinates its incident response with other local authorities, Category One and Category Two responders, the emergency services, the environment agency and various utility providers.
Council had previously relied on information pertaining to an incident being recorded initially via pen and paper. The records were then collated from each individual’s handwritten records and typed up into a log of events for the purpose of incident debriefs. This was not only time consuming, but prone to inaccuracies due to the level of information recorded. The council wanted to improve the way in which it created and organised records during and after an incident. Gateshead is using Vocal’s products.
Gateshead Resilience Officer Michael Reynard says: “I soon started receiving calls from our Customer Services Team, who were receiving reports of trees that had been blown down, so I started passing information on to our Local Environmental Services team and informing people in the Emergency Response Team, who also logged in to the system. The system helped enormously in recording information and establishing that each issue was being dealt with, and it was also useful to be able to export a PDF of the incident log at any time. We had carried out an exercise with the system in October, and the incident was in December, so we felt very well prepared for the bad weather.”
“The system has raised a few in-house issues. For example, up until this month; it was difficult to see which issues were still outstanding on the log due to the way it was presented on screen. This changed the team dynamic to a degree as we needed someone dedicated to focus on any outstanding issues to make sure they were progressing. However, the system update that went live recently allows information to be filtered and unresolved issues can now be easily identified, which has made the system more user-friendly.
“I’ve raised any issues that we’ve found with the Vocal help team, and they’ve all been dealt with successfully. I feel confident in the fact that if we find any issues, we can raise and resolve them quickly.
“So far, I’ve trained approximately half of the team to use the system, and will be completing the process during February 2014. We need to review our internal guides and documents to use as part of future training, but the next stage is to set up a series of exercises, both in-house and with our partners – the more people who familiarise themselves with the system, the better.”
“We tend to share good practice with others in our Local Resilience Forum, which covers six local authority areas – Northumberland, Gateshead, Newcastle, Sunderland, North Tyneside, and South Tyneside. Once we finish our training, we’ll invite other local authorities and partner organisations to demonstrations, to show the technology that we have adopted.”
“We’ve found using Incident Log extremely useful. We’ve viewed it as a really good investment, and have gone on leaps and bounds, technology-wise, since we’ve implemented it.”
“We are about to embark on a wide range of community engagement work, that will strengthen the relationships and improve communications that we have between ourselves and our residents and business communities. “
“It is envisaged that, following on from an earlier pilot scheme, we can involve community members as Volunteer Community Resilience Wardens. They will be our eyes and ears on the ground to help protect vulnerable people and property during an incident. All of the information they provide to us, will of course be logged on our new system.”
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