Agenda item

(1)       Mr Harwood informed the Committee that the Environment Agency had issued 106 Flood Alerts and Flood Warnings since the previous meeting of the Committee on 18 November 2013. This contrasted with the total of 95 in the whole of 2013.  The same period had seen 87 Severe Weather Warnings, as opposed to 42 in 2013. 

(2)       Mr Harwood said that the whole of Kent had been affected over the period, and that this had been in terms of storm conditions as well as flooding. The extent of power outages, some 28,000 recorded across Kent, had contributed significantly to the problems faced by responders.

(3)       Mr Harwood referred to lectures given some ten years earlier by the Insurance Industry in which the prediction had been made that weather patterns were changing and that storms were increasingly tracking from the Atlantic Ocean across the southern UK, instead of the Bay of Biscay and northern Scotland.  This prediction appeared to have been borne out by recent events.  In a warming world, with increased sea and air temperatures, it was predicted that autumns and winters would become increasingly wet and stormy.  

(4)       Mr Harwood then said that emergency planning delivery in Kent was changing from the start of the 2014/15 financial year. Ten of the currently thirteen members of the Emergency Planning Team would be seconded to a multi-agency Resilience Team based within the Kent Fire and Rescue Service.  KCC Emergency Planning would now consist of Mr Harwood himself and Mr Greg Surtees.

(5)       Mr Harwood replied to a question from Mrs Stockell by saying that the creation of the multi-agency Resilience Team, comprising Fire, Police and KCC Emergency Planning, was designed to strengthen the County’s ability to respond to emergencies.  The Emergency Planning Centre would need to be retained as KCC was the Lead Agency for a number of functions.  He said that it would now become even more important for Managers and other staff across KCC to engage more robustly with the emergency planning agenda to ensure that corporate resilience was maintained.

(6)       Mr Harwood went on to pay tribute to the Voluntary Sector whose work across the entire range of responses to the winter severe weather emergencies had been crucial.

(7)       Dr Eddy reported that he had visited the local Emergency Centre in Dover shortly after the coastal event had begun.  Whilst he had been there, an urgent request had been received from the Police for some of its staff to go to Sandwich. Having done so, these Dover DC staff had neither been given the necessary equipment nor been fed.

(8)       Dr Eddy also reported that some of the affected areas in the Dover District (such as East Studdle) had never experienced an emergency such as this before.  Overall, the public had been very complimentary about the high quality response from local authority personnel in that area.

(9)       RESOLVED that the level of alerts received since the last meeting of the Committee be noted together with comments made during discussion of this item.