Community Emergency Hubs are about the community coming together to do what they can to help each other - people helping people with what they have available. The Wellington Region Emergency Management Office (WREMO) works with communities to empower and promote a community-led response to the challenges that communities will face during a disaster. Community Emergency Hubs will be opened by people in their community, not official staff, when there is a need for the community to help itself, in a situation where there has been widespread infrastructural damage, damage to buildings and roads, or communication networks are down for extended periods.

Sharing of information is one of the key objectives of the Community Emergency Hubs. Two-way communication is essential, with Hubs providing information to the official response via communication with Emergency Operations Centres, and also receiving and spreading key safety and public information messages from the official response back to the community. Information gathered at the Hubs improves the Situational Awareness for the official response, allowing resources and help to be distributed where they are most needed. The flow of information back to the Hubs will provide the community with information, helping everyone to make informed decisions about how to help themselves. It is important to identify tools that a community and official responders can use to help them make smarter decisions when seconds count. In this workshop, we intend to explore how the Community Emergency Hubs can enhance Situational Awareness of responders and the community, with the aim of building community resilience.

 

Workshop Scope:

• Improved situational awareness before, during and after an emergency event through systems and processes

Main Objectives:

• Improve situational awareness and disaster support to the community through better linkages as part of the Community Emergency Hub model
• Explore the appropriateness of current information sharing mechanisms used by Community Emergency Hubs to develop their situational reports and identify viable alternatives which can further improve their current practices; especially focusing on information sharing between the Emergency Operations Centre and Community Emergency Hub