bedfordshire gas leak!
 

having just taken over as the new chairman for the Beds and Cambs group, we started with a baptism of fire last Tuesday.

we received a call for assistance last Tuesday following a gas main being attacked with a JCB on a building site. this led to 6500 properties being affected and having their Gas supplies stopped immediately.

we were initially asked for assistance by the LRF to support the set up of a community rest centre and information point, it became quickly apparent that this incident was going to become long term and we were asked to provide continuous support through the days following

we were mainly tasked with welfare calls for the vulnerable within the area, i think the list made it up to 400 properties in the first 24 hours, delivering heaters and cooking facilities as required and ensuring people were fully aware of the situation

due to the number of responders continuously required we gained assistance from Herts 4x4 response, this enabled us to make sure our volunteers were rested as well.

we ended up at the peak providing 6 vehicles from 0800 to 2200hrs with over night standbys for some of the group. the incident was finally stood down on Monday afternoon at 1600hrs, after 7 days, much to the relief of all involved

i think there is a lot of reflection taking part on our behalf as to how to manage a long standing incident in the future and do we need to push the mutual aid out further. a huge learning curve for our whole team


Graeme Tolliday
Beds and Cambs 4x4 response - chairman
BC 055

One of the very worrying things about being on this callout was that the lists prepared by National Grid for which properties needed checks to be made on their owners was that they were "sorted" in order of HOUSE NUMBER!

Not Postcode (most didn't have that).

Not Town/Village (some didn't have that either)

Not Street name (many were misspelled)

All in all, completely impractical and wasteful of resources as multiple vehicles ended up calling on adjacent or close properties.

It certainly suggested, to me anyway, that address data quality could have been greatly improved and, indeed, made me wonder whether councils - or us as response organisations - should maintain such bulk data themselves. It certainly slowed down the progress of each team.

As an incident I felt 'our side' worked well, so congrats Graeme on your baptism of (gas) fire :-P

AlisonW

Its down to the LRF to collate vulnerable persons lists. Usually there is a list of lists and is a bit of a minefield but 4x4 Response teams should not be collating or holding such information, it is far beyond our scope and remit.

Well done to all for getting lobbed into the deep end. Managing a multi day incident is indeed a challenge, even for the more seasoned teams.

I wasn't thinking of that at all, but of having proper gazetteers of our 'patches': road names, towns/villages/districts, & postcodes, basically, so that we can locate places more easily.

Aha gotcha. Now depending on if Herts have a line in the OS PSMA Agreement, you can download a gazetteer with all the above in, to go with the OS Mastermap et all.

Simon - yes, I keep one in the car! Sadly though while it does have a street index you first need to know which town/village to look in.

And in this case, I was in Bedfordshire trying to find places - my satnav managed some of them but it was very much trial and error.

We recommend the Phillips Street Atlas, as it provides OS grid references and is (was?) the same that our CAT1s use.

Looking at the Bristol/Bath one, the street index isn't broken by town/village and includes schools, hospitals etc.

:: looks ::
Damn, Bedfordshire hasn't been updated since January 2009 and is out of print. Oh well, thanks for the linkie.