London scoping - ukcip

Final Report
139
outbreaks of food poisoning from food spoiling in higher temperatures and heat
stress victims due to an intensifying urban heat island;
The Fire Brigade plays a critical role in responding to flooding, i.e. rescuing people
and unblocking and clearing highways, pumping out water, dealing with fires
caused by electrical storms and stabilising wind damaged buildings. This is
important to allow medical assistance and to allow the fire service to respond
effectively to other emergencies in the locality, such as fires. The floods of 2000 in
other parts of the UK led to significant over-demand for the fire service, leading to
major delays in crews getting to incident sites (Speakman, pers.com.). A severe
flood in London on the 7 th August 2002 resulted in 1,400 emergency calls to the
London Fire Brigade in just 8 hours, one of the highest demands ever;
Water and electricity utilities, which have a duty to restore services to dwellings as
soon as feasible.
An important lesson from the 1998 and 2000 floods is the need for effective and wellorchestrated
responses on the part of all the emergency services, including local and national
government, the Environment Agency, the fire brigade, the medical services, and so on. It was
found that a clear command centre is required at a suitable spatial scale (i.e. relative to the scale
of the flooded catchment itself), which liases with lower-down local emergency response
centres (Speakman, pers. comm.). A continued increase in weather-related emergencies will
necessitate more resources being devoted to the emergency services.
An issue that needs to be addressed is the public’s understanding of procedures following
weather-related emergencies. This is an issue for emergency planning in general but climate
change may contribute to an increased frequency of emergency events. Previously, many
people’s response to an emergency has been to seek shelter in the underground system. In a
flood emergency such as failure of the Thames Barrier this would not be appropriate as the
underground system may also be subject to flooding. Therefore there is a need for improved
public communication on flooding, its consequences and flood warning. As mentioned above,
the EA is carrying out a national scale project on communicating flood risk. A project is also
planned on the socio-economic impacts of flooding. It would be helpful if this study examined
the issues surrounding the public’s response to climate change emergencies.
Previous research suggests that the EA’s new categorisation of flood risks communicated via
the media is clearer than the previous system, and also that its Floodline telephone service has
been generally successful in providing information on request (Scottish Executive 2001).
Where communities are well networked, there is likely to be a greater ability to respond to
warnings and emergencies such as flooding, than in those communities which are highly
fragmented. In general, more affluent communities are better able to respond effectively to
emergencies than poorer communities. Better networked communities are more able to look
after the interests of those who are relatively worse-off and isolated or who have more
dependants, e.g. the elderly, single parents, large families, etc. This difference in the ability of
communities to respond to extreme events could also be used in the formulation of emergency
service response strategies, through targeting the most vulnerable (i.e. less affluent and more
fragmented) communities first (Shackley et al. 2001, Scottish Executive 2001).
An integral part of the Environment Agency’s Flood Warning service is to produce a London
Flood Warning Plan for fluvial flooding. A workshop is held each year with its professional
partners to review this plan and ensure the details provided take account of recent flooding.