Community resilience arrangements allow a community to take co-ordinated action to minimise damage and disruption to their community’s people and infrastructure. Arrangements can ensure that communities are better prepared to cope until the emergency responders arrive, which in turn allows Fife Council and other emergency responders to direct and dedicate scarce resources in an emergency more efficiently.
First, speak to people in your community. It is important to do this as any arrangements made will require a core group of people to lead your community’s arrangements and raise awareness across the wider community. Your group should have a core team who will:
- develop the community’s chosen form of arrangement(s);
- activate and co-ordinate the arrangements when required; and
- be the point of contact for the community when liaising with Fife Council.
Visit the Ready Scotland website to access a guide for developing community-led emergency response arrangements - Annexes | Ready Scotland
Once a group has been established, consider the points below to get the ball rolling:
- Think about the risks to your community and how these could impact your community. Have a look at Fife’s Community Risk Register if you are unsure. You will have a good idea of the most obvious risks to your home, family, friends, and community.
- Consider what existing skills, knowledge, and resources exist locally that your community could harness to reduce the impacts of an incident on people, your local environment, and infrastructure.
How can these resources be co-ordinated within your community to help you work together? It is helpful to consider a suitable format for recording your community’s agreed response arrangements. The format you choose is up to you and your community - whatever works for your community!
Examples of the types of formats of arrangements your community could develop:
- Community Emergency Plan
- The recommended aim of a community emergency plan is to help communities to prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies in a way that complements the work of the local emergency responders.
- It provides a framework to support a community response to an incident.
- A plan could include a list of risks to your community, community response action plan, asset list, phone tree.
- Asset list, or map, of key community resources
- This is helpful for noting down key contacts and resources within the community that can be harnessed during a community response to an incident.
- Phone tree
- Contains key contacts and provides a clear line of communication for alerting those within the community that are part of pre-arranged response arrangements.
- Community-Led Place of Safety Arrangements
- Useful links and contacts
- A list of useful contacts and links such as emergency services, Fife Council, utility companies, Met Office, SEPA, Traffic Scotland, news pages, and radio stations.
Activating your Community Emergency Resilience Arrangements
- Community emergency resilience arrangements are owned, and therefore activated, by your community.
- On becoming aware of an incident affecting your community, your community lead will decide whether to activate your community emergency resilience arrangements depending on the impacts on your community.
- If your community’s arrangements are activated, your community lead should:
- Inform Fife Council’s Emergency Resilience Team of activation and advise of issue(s), identify support required and any actions to be taken by your community.
- Determine the most appropriate level of community response, including activation of community resources, as required
- Continue to liaise with Emergency Resilience Team as the multi-agency point of contact throughout the response.
- If your community’s arrangements are not activated, your community leads should agree monitoring requirements and contingency arrangements should conditions change.
Guidance and Resources
What support can Fife Council provide?
Any arrangements a community puts in place to prepare their community and promote emergency resilience are owned by the community. Fife Council can offer advice and support throughout the process of developing community led emergency resilience arrangements. Fife Council will also provide a link between the community and other emergency response agencies.
Please contact the Fife Council Emergency Resilience Team using the contact details below.
For information relating to insurance cover for community emergency resilience activities led by a Community Council/sub-group, please visit this page: Public Liability Insurance.
