Fife Council emergency plans

Our Resilience Policy and Framework links to our duties within the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. We must prepare for, respond to and recover from any incident impacting on Fife’s communities. This document provides a framework for ensuring resilience is embedded across all council services.

This plan outlines how a Fife Council response to an incident will be co-ordinated. It provides an overview of key Council Service roles and responsibilities.

The plan can be applied to a range of scenarios.

This plan sets out the support and arrangements required to establish an emergency centre in response to request by the emergency services  during an incident.  Types of emergency centre are detailed below:

• Place of safety
• Emergency Rest Centre
• Family and Friends Reception Centre
• Survivor Reception Centre
• Humanitarian Assistance Centre

The Council has 34 emergency centres across Fife which have been assessed as suitable premises for emergency centre use.  The type of centre most often required is an Emergency Rest Centre The management and operational arrangements for an Emergency Rest Centre are detailed within the Emergency Centre Plan along with the roles and responsibilities of Fife Council staff involved in providing these facilities.

This plan sets out the arrangements in place for a multi-agency response to a major accident in Fife. The aim is to reduce the impact on Fife’s communities.

A major accident is defined as:

"an incident which results from an uncontrolled development at a facility falling under the following regulations which leads to serious danger to human health or the environment and involves one or more dangerous substances."

These regulations include:

• the Control of Major Accident Hazard Regulations (2015)
• the Defence Major Accident Control Regulations (2019)
• the Pipeline Safety Regulations (1996)

The facilities in Fife that fall under these regulations are listed within this plan.

This plan aims to make sure we can respond quickly to a significant pollution incident. This involves chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear substances. By following this plan, we can reduce the impact on Fife’s communities.

A significant pollution incident is something that a service can't manage as part of their daily tasks. It includes:

• oil spills
• chemical spills and/or leaks
• smoke plumes
• dust

This Plan details the specific arrangements on how Fife Council will effectively respond to, recover from and mitigate the impact of a large-scale communicable disease impacting on the communities in Fife. For this plan, we use the definition of communicable disease as an illness that can be easily transferred from human to human and / or from animal to human.  Some examples include COVID-19, pandemic influenza, ebola, and SARS.

It will support the integrated emergency management arrangements to ensure the welfare of the Fife public, particularly young, elderly and vulnerable people al the way into the long-term rehabilitation and recovery of the community.

The plan dovetails with NHS Fife’s Pandemic Influenza Plan, and Fife Council’s Business Continuity Plans, while being in line with the World Health Organisation (WHO) recognised phases of a global pandemic influenza outbreak

This is an event-specific contingency plan which identifies how Fife Council will focus on the continuity of business as normal and in providing support in anticipated areas of additional demand such as community and social care and dealing with excess deaths.

This plan details our role in responding to and recovering from an animal disease outbreak. We are here to support the Scottish Government and the Animal and Plant Health Agency if it'll impact on Fife’s communities.

It focuses on the specific arrangements, as well as those detailed in our Incident Management Plan.

Examples of notifiable animal diseases include avian influenza, foot and mouth and rabies.

You can download a copy of the plan from the bottom of this page.

This plan looks at the specific arrangements we have to lessen the impact of a potential or actual shortage of fuel. This affects both transport and heating fuel. This can have a devastating impact on Fife's communities.

It will also deal with what happens when local fuel supplies are disrupted. This is before or after an activation of the National Emergency Plan for Fuel. In this case, a UK-wide disruption is likely.

You can download a copy of the plan from the bottom of this page.

These arrangements detail Fife Council’s response to severe weather events impacting on Fife’s communities, in line with the aim of the Incident Management Plan, to ensure Fife Council effectively responds to and recovers from any weather-related event.

This plan delineates the council's preparedness, response and recovery actions and, as all our plans, it encompasses resilience and collaborative working with partners and all category of responders.