Safety-regions in The Netherlands
Mees Dekker
Safety-regions
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Introduction
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Why?
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What problem had to be solved/what was our aim?
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How did we try to do that; what is a safety-region actually
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What have we achieved
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Food for thought
Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region
November 8th - 9th, 2012
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Safety-regions : why ?
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Some major (near-) disasters
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Boeing 747 crashes into Amsterdam (1992)
Evacuation due to high water (rivers) (1995)
Hercules crashes at Eindhoven Airport (1996)
Dakota crashes near Den Helder (1996)
Legionella contamination (1999)
Fireworks explosion Enschede (2000)
Major fire in bar Volendam (2001)
Shifting of a dyke near Wilnis (2003)
Fire in detention centre at Schiphol (2005)
Airline crash Schiphol (2009)
Assault on Queen’s day at Apeldoorn (2009)
Fire at Moerdijk (2011)
Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region
November 8th - 9th, 2012
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What was our aim?
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Better protection of civilians against risks;
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Better relief in case of disaster or crisis
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Centralized co-ordination (command and control) over firebrigades, police-forces, medical services, crisismanagement
and disaster relief actions
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Enhanced administrative and operational power
Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region
November 8th - 9th, 2012
4
What is a Safety-region?
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A safety-region is a mandatory cooperation of all
municipalities in a region (25 in The Netherlands)
Safety-regions include:
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All municipal firebrigades (to be reorganised into 25 regional fire
brigades)
Medical aid organisation (direction only)
Control room
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4 levels of co-ordination: GRIP 1-4
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Mayor of “disaster location” is CinC in GRIP 1 -3
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Mayor of main city is taking over in GRIP 4
Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region
November 8th - 9th, 2012
5
Safetyregions and others?
25 Safety regions, in addition to
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12 provinces
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8 plusregions
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415 municipalities
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10 judicial districts
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10 police regions
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19 environmental authorities
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28 health regions
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25 ambulance regions
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27 local water boards
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3 regional military commands
Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region
November 8th - 9th, 2012
6
What have we achieved?
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Awareness that a “multi-approach” is essential
New laws as of Oct 1st 2010
All regions are/have
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formally established
risk-analysis
policy-papers
disaster action plans
Multiservice training
Local knowledge and anchorage
Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region
November 8th - 9th, 2012
7
Food for thought
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Focus on physical safety; social safety not included
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How to raise sense of urgency
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Can safety be divided
Physical disasters occur relatively seldom
Too much emphasis on riskmanagement and prevention, too
little on consequence management
Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region
November 8th - 9th, 2012
8
Food for thought
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Politicians are CinC (according to the law) but are they
really up to that (do they have the capabilities?)
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Do we really need 25 regions
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Each region is relatively small, so chances of “bordercrossing”
disasters and effects are high
Many officials are needed, must be trained and paid, but each has very
few opportunities to have “live experiences”
Because of this: very few professionals, lots of “supplementary jobs”
Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region
November 8th - 9th, 2012
9
Food for thought
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Organisational questions
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Is it wise to combine operations; informationmanagement and “medical
direction” in one organisation
Two essential partners are formally not branches of the safety-region,
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Police (has other boundaries)
Environmental services
Military to be included?
Funding - imbalance in organisation
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Fire brigades 10 (or more) times bigger than other branches of safetyregions
Safety-region is funded locally, police and military are funded nationally.
Therefore : different stakeholders
Tendency to put high risk installations in sparsely populated area’s,
therefore less funding for high risks
Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region
November 8th - 9th, 2012
10
Coordinated actions : GRIP
GRIP: 4 phases of increasing seriousness
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Incident with limited scale; source control only; but coordination between
emergency services is necessary
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Incident with both source and effect control; impact on surroundings
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Incident of disaster that threatens well being of large groups of population
within one municipality
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Incident of disaster that threatens well being of large groups of population
in several municipalities/regions.
5.
Incident of disaster that threatens well being of large groups of population in the
entire country or several countries.
Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region
November 8th - 9th, 2012
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Questions
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