Captia Symonds leads team for emergency response

Sponsored by Defra and the Welsh Assembly Government, the eight-day exercise - known as Watermark - is scheduled to be held in March 2011.The event will test emergency responses to a major flood scenario across several regions of the UK by agencies such as the Police, Fire, Coastguard, Ambulance etc, as well as Local Authorities.

The exercise will include government involvement through COBR (Cabinet Office Briefing Room), as well as regional and local emergency command centres across England and Wales.

The team will focus on three main aspects of work on the project.

The first will be development of the story line for the exercise which will be based on an eight day severe storm scenario with devastating surface water, river and coastal flooding.

This will involve: the live running of more than 50 individual command facilities; the supply of simulated information to build the scenarios that will unfold throughout the event; specific details including realistic local flood conditions based on telemetry data providing rainfall amounts, river levels and flood forecast alarms; individual phone calls, SMS texts, faxes and emails which will alert the emergency services.The second aspect is the support of the planning teams with web-based collaboration software.The third aspect will be supporting the Environment Agency in the management of the event.The team and its Environment Agency partners will be running a series of events to build up to the main exercise from November.