Disaster Management Centre whether contingency plans were used, Otto answered, “Yes, but I believe in a one pager contingency plan stating who should do what with what resources and in a given timeframe.”
The emergency call centre
Equipment The DMC has been equipped with the latest Caremon X call taking and dispatch software. Aurecon assisted the Eden District Municipality to equip the centre with hardware and software for incident management. The project included installation of a customised information system and a disaster management workstation, equipped with Aurecon's GEM (C3) emergency readiness system. This system is an integrated software solution designed to assist a government organisation in identifying potential disasters or mitigating the impact and severity of actual disasters. A number of monitors and screens provide displays of AFIS and weather-related data as well links to a centrally located server with geographic information system (GIS) maps and data for the whole region. Hardware includes mostly Hewlett Packard (HP) and DELL and a multiband radio system with Motorola radios. All data is digitised on the GIS platform.
Eden is one of five districts in the Western Cape
District Municipality’s Emergency Management Services, Mossel Bay Municipality and ER24. The most common incident/ emergency scenarios that the DMC encounters includes floods, wildfires, drought, animal diseases, rock falls, hazardous material (hazmat) incidents and major road traffic accidents. When asked whether there were any incidents unique to the DMC, Otto replied, “Not really but I am sure this is the one DMC in the country that had to deal with the most disasters in the last six years. The centre is activated on average about once a quarter during the past six year period. 18
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Disaster Management
“Preparation for disasters starts with a comprehensive communitybased disaster risk assessment, the determination of vulnerable communities as well as the evaluation of the capacity of communities to deal with these identified risks. Once this has been done disaster risk reduction plans is compiled and included into the district as well as local integrated development planning strategies,” says Otto. “Contingency planning, table top exercises as well as real scenario simulation exercises are also done to be better prepared to deal with any eventuality,” he added. When asked
Ideal situation When we asked Otto what he would do differently in an ideal situation, he replied, “I would make it compulsory for local authorities to employ dedicated suitably qualified disaster management officials and then second these staff to the district DMC for operational command and control. I would place the head of disaster management in the office of the municipal manager with a closer link to the IDP manager. The ultimate DMC We asked Otto to describe the ultimate DMC should there be no budget constraints. “I presume a nationally integrated real time command and control platform with access to all national-, provincial and local data and electronic communication links to all the local municipalities in the district would be the ultimate. Real time live video streaming of major events as well as from equipped local joint operation centres (JOCs) would also be available.” “And the cherry on the top would be dedicated suitably qualified disaster management officials in place on all levels of government." Volume 1
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No 5