Four operators at the Bacton Gas Terminal Complex provide a free warning and informing service to local residents as part of their statutory obligations under the Control of Major Accident Hazards (COMAH) regulations. Shell, Perenco, National Grid and Interconnector use the Alert Cascade Mass Notification Service to let the local community know about exercises, testing and on very rare occasions, live incidents. Traditionally, the operators have encouraged residents to sign up for the service by sending out postal registration forms, but this year, they ditched the postal returns and gave residents the choice to sign up on a website, register via SMS text message or call a dedicated local number to register by phone.

Stephanie Dicker, QSHE Manager for Perenco UK’s Bacton terminal, commented: ” We have used Alert Cascade to warn and inform our Public Information Zone for some years now, but despite continued efforts to encourage residents to sign up for the free service, seemed to have hit a brick wall in increasing the number of registrations we got from our mail outs. Alert Cascade worked with us to implement a new suite of sign up options; initially we were sceptical about whether signing up via SMS text message would appeal to our local demographic, but our most recent mail out this year showed a significant increase in registrations – we received over 30% more responses when we included the new options in our letter.”

Russell Pearson, Managing Director of Alert Cascade Limited, commented: “Continual evolution in communication technology means that the way people communicate with each other is also evolving; in 2015 statistics show that over 95% of adults in the UK owned a personal mobile phone, and smartphones overtook laptops as the UK internet user’s number on device for the first time ever. So, for us, introducing a new responsive web page to improve the internet sign up experience on a smartphone and adding an SMS registration capability was the logical step forward. We’re now working with other COMAH sites across the UK to replicate the success that Bacton Gas Terminal Complex have had with their local community engagement levels.”

About Alert Cascade Limited

The company specialises in a suite of software communication and collaboration solutions for Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Crisis Communications, Operations Management and Control Room environment.

Natural disaster, emergency incident, IT systems failure, product recall, the impact of terrorist or criminal activity, damage to reputation or brand-name; a crisis means different things to different people; what is common however, is the need to react and manage your way back to normality as quickly as possible. Many leading international and UK based public and private sector organisations trust Alert Cascade to provide them with ‘high availability’ secure applications that reduce the time between knowing about a mission critical situation and doing something about it.

Alert Cascade delivers solutions that have been used successfully in the aftermath of the Asian Tsunami disaster, during the 7/7 London bombings and for response, collaboration and recovery from factory fires, power failures, severe weather, IT-disasters, supply chain issues and numerous other incidents across the globe.

About the Bacton Gas Terminal Complex

The Bacton complex covers an area of about 180 acres and was opened in 1968. The complex comprises six gas terminals, four of which have COMAH responsibilities. The site is a vital part of the UK infrastructure and currently imports a quarter of the UK’s gas supply.