Communities and Local Government

In 2006, Mick Massey provided technical consultancy to the New Dimension Command and Control project.

New Dimension provides an enhanced national infrastructure to deploy and co-ordinate Fire and Rescue Service resources in response to single or multiple large-scale incidents. This includes the provision of procedures and protocols for national deployment which interface and work within existing national inter-agency and cross-Government emergency response arrangements.

A major incident could occur at any location and part of the national co-ordination arrangements for a response includes the provision of regionally based vehicles for communications and co-ordination, known as enhanced command support (ECS) vehicles. MM has worked with the New Dimension project and the Fire and Rescue Services to develop and procure nine ECS vehicles for England to provide a mobile capacity for command and control. The ECS vehicles will add resilience to current national and regional arrangements for incident management and will provide a capability should a catastrophic incident wipe out other fixed communication links.

In the event of an incident a strategic holding area could be established which will reflect the implications of the incident and have the ability to scale up or down accordingly. One or more ECS vehicles will deploy to the strategic holding area to provide command support to the incident commander and to manage activity within the strategic holding area. Support facilities within the strategic holding area could include storage of additional equipment, toilets, showers, catering, maintenance and the means to manage these facilities.

Best practice of other agencies and international organisations was used in the development of new training command training at a catastrophic incident level to develop the capability of the service to a new national level.