Red Cross Blogs

Exercise Watermark tests how ready we are for floods

By Katrina Crew
March 7, 2011 at 2:13 pm

For many people in the UK, 2007 will be remembered as the year the nation was covered in water. More than a month of torrential summer rain made rivers break their banks, causing incredible damage to water supplies, homes, businesses and travel routes.

I had just started working for the British Red Cross and was sent to Gloucestershire, where up to 350,000 people had lost their water supply, to gather stories about the work our logistics specialists and emergency response volunteers were doing. For the first time since the Second World War, we delivered food parcels to people in the UK. One man I spoke to remembered receiving a Red Cross food parcel during the war and was surprised to find himself needing another one.

Across the country, we had 900 volunteers and staff responding to the floods, helping transport people to safety, delivering water, food parcels and toiletries and staffing rest centres. It was our largest operation in the UK since the Second Word War.

This week, we’re again responding to flooding across the country, but this time we had months of advance warning. This time, the floods aren’t real.

Many of our volunteers and staff are taking part in Exercise Watermark, a national emergency flooding exercise led by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), with the Welsh Assembly Government, the Environment Agency and the Civil Contingencies Secretariat. Exercise Watermark is testing the arrangements across England and Wales to respond to severe, wide-area flooding.

Our volunteers and staff will be supporting the emergency services in evacuating buildings, providing first aid and emotional support at rest centres, and staffing volunteer hubs.

On Wednesday, our volunteers will support the evacuation of Sutton-on-Sea in Lincolnshire, involving 200 volunteer evacuees including 70-100 schoolchildren. On Thursday Red Cross volunteers will support the statutory agencies with a water exercise at Tattershall Lakes in Lincolnshire, involving our swift water rescue team from Scotland – a team that played a big role in helping communities during the floods of 2007.

As a leading voluntary organisation for emergency response, we have agreements with local authorities to help them respond during disasters. Some disasters – like house fires – only affect a single family, and our volunteers support the family while firefighters battle the flames. Other disasters, like the 2007 floods, affect thousands of families. Making sure we’re prepared is vital, since so many depend on our help.

Be ready to help your community. Become a UK emergency response volunteer

See our free tips on how to prepare your family for disasters

Sign up for our Disaster Response Challenge, a disaster simulation designed to show you how our logistics specialists respond to emergencies.

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Tags: disaster, disaster challenge, disaster management, disaster response, emergency planning, emergency response, floods, prepare for disasters

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 7th, 2011 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Emergencies, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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