Combining Municipal Emergency Management Committees
The Emergency Management Act 2006 allows for councils to combine their emergency management committees if the following conditions are met:
- A written application is accepted by the Minister
- It is agreed which council will chair the combined committee
- All affected councils are within the same emergency management region.
Community Warnings and Public Information
MEMC members need to have a knowledge of the well-established and flexible arrangements to ensure an understanding of roles and responsibilities for requesting or coordinating warnings and public information.
The Response Management Authority is responsible for providing public information about the emergency. This includes granting access for media representatives to visit the emergency site. Comments outside an agency’s scope are referred to the Response Management Authority in the first instance or to the whole-of-government Public Information Unit, through the Council’s Communications Officer, if it has been activated.
The Tasmanian Emergency Management Arrangements provides an overview of warnings including who is authorised to issue the warning in Tasmania including:
- Weather warnings
- Emergency Alert
- Standard Emergency Warning Signal (SEWS).
Resources below include; the Public Information and Warnings Handbook by the AIDR and the Tasmanian video Introduction to Public Information and Warnings.
The Emergency Management Act 2006 details specific responsibilities for councils to support a Response Management Authority during an emergency, including the operation of a Municipal Emergency Coordination Centre.
Terminology used in this module
The TEMA defines the following terms:
- Capability as the collective ability and power to deliver and sustain an effect within a specific context and time frame
- Capacity as the key determinant of how long capability can be sustained for a particular level of ability.
The context to which these terms are used is the State Government agencies and government owned businesses maintain their own capacity and capability arrangements, but a Municipal Emergency Management Committee need to consider, prepare and maintain arrangements to meet their capability and capacity requirements.
This brings us to the completion of this module
In Summary
Understanding the relationship played between the REMC and MEMC is the essence to this module and is supported by the MEMG produced by LGAT. It is important to gain an overview of this relationship to understand:
- The Guidelines provide consistent, clear and practical advice to Municipal Emergency Management Committee members in order to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies, whether natural or caused by human activity
- The Guidelines contain links to key publications, including emergency management plans, interviews with Tasmanian emergency management stakeholders sharing their experiences and templates
- The REMC works closely with the MEMC to assist and may impose functions from time to time on the Municipal Committee and, Municipal EM Coordinators, to proactively engage with stakeholders to enhance municipal emergency management arrangements.
The majority of these documents can be accessed on the SES webpage under Emergency Management supporting documentation and resources:
- WebEOC File Library does contain many of these documents as well.
- Municipal Emergency Management Guidelines -(MEMG)
- Tasmanian Disaster Resilience Strategy 2020-2025
- People at Risk in an Emergency
- Tasmanian Emergency Risk Assessment Guidelines
- National Emergency Risk Assessment Guidelines handbook 10
- Emergency Management Australia
- Tasmanian Emergency Management Arrangements (TEMA)
- Community Engagement Framework-Our Approach to making interactions meaningful and creating community action:
- International Association for Public Participation (IAP2)
- National Strategy for Disaster Resilience: Community Engagement Framework
- National Strategy for Disaster Resilience Strat 1. supporting resilient communities through risk reduction
- Public Information and Warnings handbook
- Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (AIDR) Knowledge Hub
- Australasian Fire and Emergency services Authority