The Cabinet Office definition of Resilience is the, '...ability of the community, services, area or infrastructure to detect, prevent, and if necessary to withstand, handle and recover from disruptive challenges'. In any large enterprise, response to an emergency will inevitably involve a planned reaction by several different elements of that enterprise and by other agencies outside the enterprise. In the rail industry, for example, response to an extreme weather incident could easily involve more than a dozen different organisational actors. The plans that are invoked when an event occurs are usually detailed and complex. Most large organisations spend significant time and effort in developing these plans and in training for when they are needed. Multiagency training and exercising are vital tools in ensuring that plans are co-ordinated. However, it is almost impossible to develop plans with perfect coherence. There is strong evidence from a variety of domains to suggest that crucial dependencies between the various plans relevant to emergency response only come to light when an incident occurs. This article explores the difficulty of identifying, mapping and managing critical dependencies between planned responses through the scenario of a multi-agency response to an extreme weather event with emphasis on the rail sector, and examines how dependency management can help to optimise the response.

Chapter Contents:

• Case study
• Conclusion
• References

Inspec keywords: risk analysis; management of change; railway industry; emergency management; strategic planning

Other keywords: emergency response; rail industry; resiliency; planning; resource management; cabinet office; dependency management

Subjects: Railway industry; General management; Planning