Terms like ‘disaster’, ‘emergency’ and ‘major incident’ are all used to describe the kind of event which the emergency services and local authorities may not be able to deal with as part of their every day work.

Emergencies and disasters can happen anywhere at any time.  Place names such as Hillsborough, Lockerbie, Dunblane and Paddington remind us of the horror that others have experienced.  Transport accidents, storms, floods, fires, industrial accidents and many other events can cause distress and disruption on a massive scale and throw communities into chaos.

Crashed road tanker being righted

The Civil Contingencies Act gives a specific definition of an emergency as

• an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom,
• an event or situation which threatens serious damage to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom, or
• war, or terrorism, which threatens serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom.

Broadly speaking this will be an ‘event’ that requires the implementation of special arrangements by one or all of the emergency responders, often for the purpose of:

• the rescue and transportation of a large number of casualties
• the involvement either directly or indirectly of large numbers of people
• the handling of a large number of enquiries likely to be generated both from the public and the news media, usually addressed by the police
• the large scale combined resources of the Police, Fire, and  Ambulance Services, the Health Service and Local Authorities
• the mobilisation and organisation of the emergency responders and supporting agencies, e.g. local authority, to cater for the threat of death, serious injury or homelessness to a large number of people