Abstract
This paper details research carried out in England and Wales, France and the Netherlands on the evaluation of emergency plans for floods. To assess the flood emergency plans, 22 metrics were developed. These metrics covered a range of issues from the aims and objectives of the plan to training and exercises. A number of emergency plans in each of the three countries were reviewed using these metrics, and online surveys of emergency planners were carried out. The objectives of the surveys were to establish what information emergency planners believe is useful to incorporate in emergency plans and at what level of detail. The developed metrics and survey of end-users provided a basis to compare emergency plans. The effectiveness of an emergency plan is difficult to measure, and end-users often stated that this can only be assessed accurately after a plan has been used. Many emergency planners indicated that a well-defined description of the roles, responsibilities and communication is essential for a plan to be effective. These aspects tended to be well covered in the evaluated plans. However, other more technical aspects such as accessibility of roads, evacuation, depiction of the flood hazard and impacts of floods on critical infrastructure can be considerably improved. The main challenge for emergency planners is to avoid filling plans with generic text and to provide an appropriate level of specific detail in the plan whilst ensuring the “usability” of the plan.
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Acknowledgements
This research was carried out as part of the Flood Incident Management—A FRAMEwork for improvement (FIM FRAME) project carried out as part of the second ERA-Net CRUE funding initiative (http://www.crue-eranet.net/). The project is funded by the joint Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)/Environment Agency Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management Research and Development Programme in England and Wales and the Ministère de l’Ecologie, de l’Energie, du Développement durable et de la Mer, en charge des Technologies vertes et des Négociations sur le climat in France. We wish to acknowledge the support of the both the funders, the emergency responders who participated in this research and the comments of the reviewers. This work would also not have been possible without the Royal Academy of Engineers (RAEng) who provided a Global Research award to one of the authors. We wish to extend our thanks to the RAEng for their support.
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Lumbroso, D., Stone, K. & Vinet, F. An assessment of flood emergency plans in England and Wales, France and the Netherlands. Nat Hazards 58, 341–363 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-010-9671-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-010-9671-x