There’d better be no plane crash — without national emergency plans

BATT O’KEEFFE, Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, has great hair. Not just good hair. Great hair.

Which explains why he wasn't that keen on donning a fire-fighter's helmet for the photographers at the Chief Fire Officers Association Conference last week, after he'd delivered a speech outlining Government policy on the fire service.

He didn't stay for the speech that followed his, either, which was probably just as well. It might have depressed him to hear the speaker me point out that Ireland currently sits at the heart of a cluster of circumstances conducive to the creation of a major emergency, and is so unprepared for such an emergency that were it to happen it could escalate into a national disaster.

The circumstances include weather change, economic growth, construction boom, huge entertainment and sports events, clustering of the very young and very old in discrete locations, exponential air travel growth resulting in pressured airports, with terrorism and anti-social behaviour on the sidelines.

Weather change makes landslides and floods more likely. Economic growth means we're building more and building differently. Immigration, particularly illegal immigration, leads to overcrowding, with consequences like the recent Paris hotel tragedy.

The Irish fire service has the leadership, teamwork, equipment and communication to handle fires, collisions, spills and collapses, but not to handle a major disaster. Traditionally, new equipment or stations went into a given area because of local political pressure, not as part of overall rational planning. So, today, while we have excellence in the fire service, it's a patchwork excellence.

"The only uniform thing is that all fire engines are red," is how one chief fire officer puts it.

Some counties send their drivers on advanced driver training. Some don't.

Some buy their protective equipment from one supplier. Some buy it from another.

Ireland, unlike Britain, has no autonomous National Fire Authority to lay down standards, create uniformity of procedures, and ensure training is constant and consistent. The Farrell Grant Sparks report, commissioned a couple of years back by the Department of the Environment, recommended the creation of such a body. Martin Cullen, when he was in office, said he was going to set it up. He didn't. Somewhere along the line, someone seems to have said "Oh, puhlease, not another quango."

However, an autonomous standards-setting body could put teeth into the fire service's inspection function. It might also bring coherence to a situation which, right now, sees:

The Fire Services Council responsible for training without the powers to insist on uniformity of skill throughout the country.

The National Safety Council responsible for the promotion of fire safety, nationally without a fire service officer on its board.

Because we don't have an autonomous fire authority or for some other reason, we don't rehearse what we'd do in the event of a Lockerbie-type emergency.

We do have emergency plans each county is supposed to dust off every four years or so. Those plans consist of a list of phone numbers and an outline of responsibilities. (Funny thing: Very few mothers-to-be tackle the birth thing with just a list of phone numbers and an outline of responsibilities. Planning for even normal EVENTS requires a little more.) But, OK, that's just the county plans. The national emergency plan that must be really impressive, mustn't it? My company works with big manufacturing plants who run rehearsals where out of the blue the sirens go off, everybody must be evacuated within a set number of minutes, and all of the logistical and communications problems which might surface get outed and sorted. Logically, the national emergency plan should follow the same pattern. It doesn't. Because there isn't one.

The Radiological Protection Institute has a national plan in the event of a nuclear disaster. (The famous iodine tablets get their big break.)

There is no statutory basis for any national emergency simulation training involving all the emergency services. No Act says exercises should be done once a year to see if the plan works. A dry-run is never going to happen. Because it doesn't HAVE to happen.

If a jumbo jet ploughs into Newtownmountkennedy, the emergency services are going to put a plan into action they've never even walked through, beforehand. They'll do it in real time, with the M50 as always serving as an overcrowded parking lot and Accident and Emergency overflowing with patients on trolleys and chairs. The services will miraculously and successfully co-ordinate. Teamwork will just happen.

Except that team work never just happens. Harvard recently did a study of teamwork in heart surgery. They observed two surgical teams, in two separate hospitals, embarking on learning and delivering a new cardiac procedure. Complicated. Risky. Challenging.

A KEY objective for both teams was to ensure that, as they did more and more of them, each procedure took less time. Reducing the time taken increases survival rates and reduces complications.

After a few months, one of the teams had radically reduced the time taken and had a better survival and success rate than the other. Which was interesting, because the team with the poorer track record was led by a more experienced surgeon.

When Harvard dug down into the data, they found the less experienced surgeon sat down with his team before each procedure and effectively 'rehearsed' it, step by step. Directly after the surgery, they sat down again, to go back over what they'd done and identify learning points. In addition and this was significant they stayed together. Whereas the more experienced (but less successful) surgeon used different team members each time, the more successful group stayed together and built up a cross disciplinary body of knowledge and expertise.

In the scenario of a jet hitting Newtownmountkennedy, none of that cross-disciplinary knowledge and expertise, not to mention mutual trust, would have been built up between the emergency services involved. Indeed, when the fire tenders, ambulances and gardaí reached Newtownmountkennedy, they would first have to elect someone to be a convener of meetings. There's no immediate, clear, Officer Commanding, none of the race-memory of shared action a major disaster would require and that simulation training would deliver.

The knock-on effects of a major disaster anywhere in the country have yet to be played out. If Monaghan, for instance, had to call for 10 or 20 fire appliances at a major incident they would strip most of Louth, Meath and Cavan of such equipment for the duration. But the "what if" implications haven't been worked through in active collaboration with bodies like the army, gardaí or Civil Defence.

A national disaster may not be likely but it's more likely than at any time in the past.

The structures, equipment, training, communication and co-ordination such a disaster would require are not, currently, in place.

The national capacity to match such a crisis is untested, unproven and uncertain.

Minister Dick Roche can change that. Batt O'Keeffe, Minister of State, has the persistence to make sure he does.

Soon would be good.