Plymouth and Cornwall Councils have joined forces with local COMAH operators to implement Alert Cascade Informer and keep local residents and businesses informed of any unfolding events. This innovative joint use of the Alert Cascade Informer system ensures that there is consistency in the information provided and the actions that residents may be asked to take, helping to keep residents safer in emergency situations.

The joint emergency planning team chose Alert Cascade Limited’s Informer solution following a detailed procurement exercise, designed to ensure that the councils and operators of local chemical and nuclear sites could quickly and easily trigger alerts, whilst local residents and businesses received the best possible communication experience. This involved looking not just at how the alerts would be delivered, and ensuring there was true resiliency in this area of the platform, but ensuring that there was an easy way for residents to opt in to receiving the alerts in the first place. As part of the solution offered by Alert Cascade, local residents and businesses are able to sign up via a secure website form, over the phone with a member of the Alert Cascade support team, or by returning a postal form to either Plymouth or Cornwall Council.

Russell Pearson, Managing Director of Alert Cascade, commented “Working with the joint emergency planning team, alongside senior managers from the local chemical and nuclear sites, we were able to provide a really robust sign up process that would meet the needs of an increasingly diverse population. We faced some unique challenges, with some of the sites being based on or close to council boundaries, meaning that we had to ensure that consistent messages were being given out not just in the area affected, but in all surrounding areas. Our Alert Cascade Informer platform is specifically designed for public warning and informing, and has given Plymouth Council, Cornwall Council, Devonport Royal Dockyard, Defence Munitions, Greenergy and Thanckes Oil Fuel Depot a way to keep each other informed and collectively keep members of the public informed. It’s great to see the hard work that went into forming this joint working partnership acknowledged by the Cabinet Office.”

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.

Supporting documentation:

UK Government: Communicating with the public