PREVENTING BRIDGE/TUNNEL EMERGENCIES AND DISASTERS

Preventing Bridge/Tunnel Emergencies and Disasters

Abstract

This system manages, that is, plans and controls, agencies, such as Fire and Police, when they respond to disasters. The EMCRS was set up to support better co-ordination between agencies responding to disaster, in reaction to a succession of enquiries into disasters which identified problems with co-ordination, both within and between the emergency services in their disaster response. Co-ordination in this context is defined as the 'harmonious integration of the expertise of all the agencies involved with the object of effectively and efficiently bringing the incident to a successful conclusion'.

Table of Contents

Abstract2

Preventing Bridge/Tunnel Emergencies and Disasters4

Introduction4

Development of design-oriented frameworks and models for HCI6

HCI planning and control for multiple task work framework7

Exercise Scorpio narrative12

Summary and future work14

References16

Preventing Bridge/Tunnel Emergencies and Disasters

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to show the development of models of the Emergency Management Combined Response System that can be used to diagnose inter-agency co-ordination problems. In the United Kingdom, there exists a system for the co-ordination of the emergency services in response to disasters, such as explosions, air crashes etc. the Emergency Management Combined Response System (Kaempf et al., 2006).

However, even after the introduction of the EMCRS there are still occasions when the emergency response to disasters has been identified as being un-co-ordinated. For example, on July 7th 2005, terrorist attacks in London left 52 dead and many more injured. The report into the terrorist attacks (Ambros-Ingerson, 2006), found that there were issues with the emergency services response, mainly due to communication problems, which led to an un-co-ordinated response. For example, although it states in the London Emergency Procedure Manual that a major incident can be declared by any of the emergency services, the implication being that this will be done on behalf of all the services, on 7th July all three primary emergency services declared a major incident, independent of each other. It was not clear to the reviewers as to why this happened, and also why a declaration of a major incident by one emergency service had not automatically mobilised units from all three (Police, Fire and Ambulance) Services. As a result the review states: “We recommend that the London Resilience Forum review the protocols for declaring a major incident to ensure that, as soon as one of the emergency services declares a major incident, the others also put major incident procedures in place. This could increase the speed with which the emergency services establish what has happened and begin to enact a co-ordinated and effective emergency response”.

There have been many methods, models and frameworks developed for analysis of Emergency Management. Specifically (Samurcay and Rogalski, 2001) have focused on communication between the services as a means of analysing distributed decision making.

The analysis allows an understanding of why one group is better than the other. The group that has a better flow of communication and distribution of roles is more efficient. This method describes a decomposition of the overall task (for the class of emergency situations) into specific ...