URS Report - Incident Management Study
Appendix B: Part 1: Typically, What Happens; and Part 2: Incident Response Targets and Incident frequencies (anecdotal)
- Part 1: Typically, What Happens
- Part 2: Incident Response Targets and Incident frequencies (anecdotal)
Part 1: Typically, What Happens
Response:
A call received by the Police in an area without a designated motorway Police group, will go through to the Force Information Room, which deals with all calls relating to police affairs, i.e. traffic related incidents and others such as burglaries, attacks etc. The CMPG have a designated Control Room that deals solely with incidents on the network that they patrol.
If the Police Control Room receive the first call about an incident, they will inform the Fire Service and the Ambulance Service if the incident details received suggest that their presence will be required. If either the Fire Service or the Ambulance Service is the first organisation to receive the call, their Control Room staff will immediately inform the Police of the incident.
Once the police are aware of the incident details the nearest available police unit is dispatched to the scene, and the traffic unit will always follow-on if they are not the nearest available unit. At arrival at the incident the scene is assessed and the fire / ambulance summoned if the original caller has not already requested them. If an incident occurs within a Police Force boundary, that Force must always attend the scene. If an adjacent Force reach the scene before the Force who cover the area that the incident has occurred in do, the adjacent Force will take control of the incident and assess requirements until the correct Force arrive. The Fire Service will usually mobilise from their stations and can therefore take a prescribed route to a location. Alternatively the Ambulance Service will, more often than not, mobilise from their last callout position, and so will not necessarily be able to take the best route to the scene to avoid obstacles such as traffic calming and level crossings.
The Fire Service will send their appliances to the affected carriageway (as described by the caller). They will also send another appliance to the opposite carriageway in case the caller was mistaken about which carriageway was affected, and in case it is easier to reach the location from the opposing carriageway. At a smaller incident, the cautious deployment of more appliances than may be necessary can cause obstruction problems at the scene. If an incident occurs at a boundary with another Fire Service, the other Service may well also attend the incident, with the Service that cover the area in which the incident has occurred taking charge.
The Ambulance Control Room operator will radio the nearest available unit, which could be a conveyance vehicle (ambulance) or a paramedic response unit (one person in vehicle). If a paramedic response unit is dispatched, an ambulance will always follow it, and the paramedic response unit will attempt to stabilise the situation until the ambulance arrives. If an incident occurs at the boundary of Ambulance Service areas, the Control Room operator may call the adjacent Service Control Room to find out if they have any available units nearer to the scene than their own units.
For incidents requiring repairs to the carriageway or roadside furniture, the Police then contact the Managing Agent that covers the section of road in which the incident has occurred. If the incident also affects county roads, the Police will also contact the Local Authority. The Police will radio the details of the incident back to the Control Room and the Control Room inform the Control Room of the Managing Agent, describing the incident and the kind of repairs that are necessary. The Managing Agent will assess whether the attendance of an engineer is required, e.g. to professionally assess bridge damage. The Managing Agent will then contact the Term Maintenance Contractor and request that they attend the scene with the appropriate personnel and equipment to deal with the incident.
The Term Maintenance Contractors may have to pull resources off other maintenance work in order to attend an incident, e.g. close roadworks at one location in order to release the required resources for the incident. If an incident requires Vehicle Recovery Agents to attend, the Police will generally inform them so as to be on standby for when they are required to attend. In some areas the Police will determine which is the appropriate garage to contact and the Control Room staff will contact them directly, as happens in Staffordshire and Warwickshire. In other areas, requests for Recovery Agents will go through to a company such as Recovery Management Services Ltd based in Birmingham, who will arrange the local garage to attend, as happens in North Yorkshire. In some areas the Police have a contract with the Automobile Association to arrange the local Recovery Agents to attend, as is the case in Cheshire.
Site Management:
The initial assessment of an incident is a very difficult and stressful task and requires adequate experience and training. In particular, the Traffic Police are responsible for managing the site and in creating a transient micro-infrastructure and communication framework at the site of an incident. Tasks that must be undertaken for scene management include:
- Confirm the location;
- Review the severity of the incident and the number of casualties;
- Set up temporary road or lane closures with coning, signs and emergency lighting;
- Request the setting of matrix signs and Variable Message Signs;
- Consider access routes for other organisations to reach the scene;
- Identify a rendezvous point;
- Estimate incident timeframe;
- Request additional support and Accident Investigation Units, where appropriate;
- Assist in life saving and attending to casualties;
- Assess damage to carriageway and road furniture;
- Arrange for notification to all the non-emergency services that might be required at the scene;
- Liase with the Managing Agents and the Local Authority regarding diversion routes;
- Set up cordons - inner cordon for emergency and non-emergency services, outer cordon for the public;
- Update the Control Room of the details;
- Inform the media of the delays expected for traffic;
- Handle the general public.
- Identify potential witnesses;
- Investigate the causes of the collision and collect and retain evidence.
Thought must also be given to the welfare of those stranded in the tailback behind an incident, particularly those who are young, old, disabled or require medication. During hot periods, they may require fluids and in cold conditions they may require blankets.
The emergency phase of the incident may involve releasing trapped casualties, extinguishing fires or containing and clearing up spillages. Releasing trapped casualties can be a time consuming task because of the careful and methodical way that it must be carried out. First the vehicle must be stabilised: the electric's disconnected, and airbags and seat belts restrained. Then the casualty is stabilised with neck braces and back harnesses fitted if appropriate. All glass needs to be removed from the vehicle before the Fire Service will begin cutting, and so the next step is glass management. Then the Fire Service creates space using hydraulic cutting gear to cut off the roof and beams. Finally they can remove the casualty, but they have to be very careful how they do this if the casualty has sustained back injuries, as the Fire Service could be liable if any further injury was sustained. Extinguishing fires can also take a significant amount of time, depending on the size of the fire, because there are usually no water resources along the roadside for the Fire Service to tap into to put the fire out with. Instead, the standard appliances can carry 1800 litres of water and they would have to operate shuttle runs to replenish the water resources. Spillages also come under the remit of the Fire Service. They have an agreement with the Environment Agency that they will contain, and if necessary clear up any spillage. If the spillage is hazardous, the use of breathing apparatus and specialist suits may be necessary. If the incident requires the use of this equipment, the Fire Service must first call in additional resources to set up relief crews. Decontamination units also need to be set up for hazardous spillages. The Fire Service has Special Incident Units that are capable of taking any spilled chemical for disposal. Non-hazardous spillages may be the responsibility of the Term Maintenance Contract or the Vehicle Recovery Agent, but it is not clear which organisation has responsibility for clearing up medical waste.
Traffic Management:
Traffic control measures are needed from the outset of an incident, as described above, to ensure that the working conditions for personnel are safe. The Police will usually set up the initial temporary road closures with cones and signs that are stored in the Police vehicles. In some parts of the country there are storage facilities along the roadside for cones and signs. The Fire Service also carry a certain amount of traffic control equipment - collapsible cones, signs and lighting, and are able to set up the temporary road closures if they are first on the scene. The Term Maintenance Contractors will be the organisation responsible for setting up more permanent road closures, and with the aid of the Local Authority, diversion routes. Setting up advisory speed limits and other message information is a task that the Police are encouraged to do as soon as possible to try to get motorists to find their own diversion routes to avoid the area. The MIDAS system will automatically set advisory speed limits and warning messages when it detects slow moving traffic. In areas where there is no MIDAS in operation, the Police will place a request with the Control Room to set up a particular speed limit on the matrix signs. In the CMPG Control Room they operate another system called the Midlands Driver Information System (MDIS), which is connected to 11 other police control offices within the area bounded by the northern part of the M25, Cambridge, Nottingham, Stafford, Birmingham and Oxford. If an incident were to occur near Newport Pagnell on the M1, a message would arrive in the Control Room for Variable Message Signs to be set for wider area strategic diversions. The Control Room operator will then ring to confirm the request and the lanes affected. The computer system then decides the most appropriate signing for drivers to try and avoid the area. For example, for the incident on the M1, the sign on the M25 might say "M1 closed, use M40 or M1/A1".
Incident Clearance:
Incident clearance itself cannot begin until any Accident Investigation has been completed, and this process can take a number of hours. For any fatal incident, or an incident that is likely to become a fatality, the Police are required to gather evidence as to the cause of the incident for the Coroner's Inquest. This investigation will include recording and gathering debris, measuring skidmarks and taking photographs. The Ambulance Service will generally provide the Police with an indication before they leave the scene as to whether they feel an incident could turn into a fatality.
From the time of the incident to the time that the Police first arrive and seal off the area, it is likely that many other vehicles will pass through the site and destroy or disperse the evidence. The emergency services themselves may destroy and disperse evidence through the actions that they may have to take. For example the spraying of a lot of water or foam over a burning vehicle may wash away of lot of evidence such as debris and skid-marks. If the Air Ambulance is called out and is required to land on the actual motorway carriageway, it will blow a lot of evidence away. It is therefore conceivable that some of the evidence may be lost, or affected in such a way as to have implications for any Accident Investigation. Specialist laser-based equipment is available that enables, at great cost, the scene to be recorded in a much more rapid fashion. This could halve the time taken for Accident Investigations, but at present there is not enough money in the budget of most of the Police Forces to buy it. When the Accident Investigation is complete, the Term Maintenance Contractors or the County Contractors can begin to clear the debris from the scene, and the Vehicle Recovery Agent can begin to remove the wreckage. Repairs to the carriageway and the road furniture may either be done immediately before the road is reopened, or can be repaired on a temporary basis, allowing the road to reopen and then be permanently repaired during a quieter period off peak. There are certain requirements set into the Managing Agents' contract regarding when repairs must be complete, e.g. for Area 10, a scarred carriageway after a vehicle fire would need to be repaired within 24 hours of the incident, whereas crash barrier damage must be repaired within 7 days, and the road be reopen during this time. Contractual agreements can impact on operational decision making e.g. specialist equipment must be paid for whether or not it is actually used at the site.
The Vehicle Recovery Agents may decide that it is necessary to close the opposite carriageway to upright a HGV, as they would need to put vehicles on both sides of the HGV to stop it from rolling right over again. For this reason, the Vehicle Recovery Agents present at the workshops have stressed the importance of their early presence at the scene to professionally assess requirements. If the decision to close the opposite carriageway is left to the latter part of the incident, the resources required to undertake this task may have left the scene and there would be additional delay to clearance. There is new specialist heavy lifting equipment available that enables very rapid vehicle recovery called rotator systems, but these are very expensive (about £200,000) and consequently there is only 4-5 of these in use throughout the country. When the Vehicle Recovery Agents remove a vehicle from the scene, as they are required to do in order to remain on the list of approved operators, they have to try to recover the costs from the owner of the vehicle. It has been estimated that some 46% (unconfirmed) of the recovery work undertaken by an operator may be unpaid. As the Vehicle Recovery Agents deal with the car owners some of whom may not be members of the AA, RAC or other clubs, they are more likely to not be able to afford to pay for the recovery of their vehicle. In addition to the recovery of vehicles involved in incidents, the Recovery Agents are also required to remove abandoned vehicles, for which the owners can often not be traced, and are therefore also non-paying jobs. In some cases the Recovery Agents have to pay an administration fee of between £12 to 15 per call out in order to remain on the list of approved operators, for both Police contracts and AA contracts for vehicle recovery. This fee also has to be recovered from the owner of the vehicle, or borne by the Recovery Agent. It has been suggested that these mounting costs will lead to the reduction in the number of Vehicle Recovery Agents, and in the quality of service that can be afforded. It will also be likely that very few Recovery Agents will be able to afford the new heavy lifting equipment that could help to speed up incident clearance significantly. This is indicative of the types of organisational problems that arise.
Once the temporary repairs have been made and the vehicles recovered the final task before reopening the road is to clear any debris, and the organisation responsible for this clearance can vary, as discussed above. This task may fall into the remit of the Term Maintenance Contractor, the Vehicle Recovery Agents, Specialist Waste Contractors or the Local Authority.
When the debris has been cleared, the Managing Agents will advise the Police whether the road is safe to reopen to traffic, and the Police ultimately have the decision to reopen. It has been estimated that it can take one hour for every mile of tailback to clear and therefore it may be several hours after the incident has been cleared before traffic flow returns to normal. There are some problems that can delay the clearance of tailbacks: for example, drivers of HGV's may run into their rest period whilst stationary in the queue, and so when the incident is cleared, they may not be able to drive their vehicles away from the scene. There may also be secondary incidents or breakdowns in the tailback that need to be cleared.
Motorists Information:
Although very little monitoring takes place, it was suggested it is vital to get accurate information output by the media in areas a long distance upstream of the incident. This would benefit both the motorists and the organisations involved in incident clearance, because the motorists would not get caught up in the traffic queue, making it easier for the incident clearance teams to reach the incident. It is apparent that a lot of harm can be done when inaccurate information discredits the system - if a matrix sign displays a 40mph speed limit when an incident has been long cleared, motorists are more likely to ignore speed limit signs in the future. There are many ways in which information is reaching the public:
- The AA Roadwatch ring the CMPG every 15 minutes for information regarding delays and they inform the local radio.
- The RAC operate the RAC Traffic Alert and the RAC Route Minder schemes that enable a motorist to get information via their mobile phones or the Internet.
- The Highways Agency inform the Central Office of Information (COI) of incidents that they themselves are informed of, and the COI informs the local radio stations.
- Managing Agents may have media consultants who put out information to the media on their behalf.
- The Police Control Rooms may give out information to the media directly.
- Motorists who witness either the incident or the tailback may ring into radio stations to inform them of the events.
- Variable Message Signs briefly describe the delays expected up ahead.
- Trafficmaster identifies areas of slow moving traffic and predicts delays via mobile phones, the Internet, or in-car navigation systems.
Part 2: Incident Response Targets and Numbers
Police:
There are different levels of response that the Police will take, depending upon the nature of the incident. Each level has a response time (immediate, routine etc) requirement specified in the local business plan which is related to the geographic nature of the area covered, which will in turn depend upon the location of the incident (urban/rural).
Fire and Rescue Service:
A call received by the Fire Service is treated with a Pre-Determined Response which depends on the location of the incident, and defines the number of appliances that need to be dispatched with a particular response time. These response times apply to building fires only however, and not roads as the Fire Station locations were designed according to proximity to buildings and not to the roads, and by law, the Fire Service only have to attend fires - they do not have to attend an incident on the motorways and trunk road network unless there is a fire. For spillages there is again nothing set down in law, but the Fire Service have an understanding with the Environment Agency that they will attend and control such situations as they have the equipment and training to do so.
Term Maintenance Contractor:
The Term Maintenance Contractor has response times that they are required to meet, specified by the Highways Agency in their contract to maintain the network. The response times set are dependent upon the time of day - generally the typical response time requirement is for one hour during the day and 1.5 hours at night. At weekends the staff will usually be on standby at their own homes and not in the depot, which will add to the response time achieved. The County staff will also be on standby at home out of office hours, and the response time achievable will depend upon when they are notified of the incident, the location of the incident, the location of standby personnel and the traffic conditions.
In areas where there are MAC contracts in place, such as Area 8 where there are Emergency Response Teams set up to respond to incidents during the peak periods, a response time of 15 to 20 minutes is achievable. In Area 10, an Emergency Support Unit on the M6 can reduce Term Maintenance Contractor response times to less than 10 minutes.
Other Non-emergency Services:
Other non-emergency services that may be required to attend the scene, e.g. Environmental Agency, Specialist Waste Contractors, Electricians, and Vets may not have to comply with any specified response time, and as non-emergency services may not be on standby out of office hours the response times achieved could be quite significant.
The response times set for the Vehicle Recovery Agents will depend upon the nature of the contract in operation, but is generally in the region of 30 minutes. It the vehicle owner is a member of one of the clubs such as the Automobile Association, the RAC or Green Flag, that organisation will send out it's own recovery vehicles. Green Flag guarantee a 1-hour response time, but the AA and the RAC do not guarantee any particular response time. It can on occasion take longer than 1 hour, often due to incorrect location information. Motorways are given priority as motorists are deemed to be at higher risk than on other road types. The clubs will only respond to cars and light goods vehicle incidents, as they do not have the equipment to deal with heavy goods vehicles.
A shortage of Accident Investigation Units in all of the areas was reported in the workshops, and in North Yorkshire, for example, it may take an hour for the Accident Investigation Unit to arrive, depending on where they are located when requested.
Incident Numbers:
CMPG - estimate that they attend about 200 incidents per day on their network.
30 of these require Vehicle Recovery Agents to attend whilst six require the presence of the Ambulance Service and the same number (some the same incidents) require the presence of the Fire Service.
Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service - estimate that they will be called to three or four incidents on roads per day, and of those three to four calls, only one would be on a motorway or trunk road.
The Managing Agents for Area 8 estimate that there are fatal accidents every two to three weeks on their network, with collisions requiring their attendance occurring every day, up to a maximum of about 32 collisions in one day.