1. Mees Dekker Safety-regions in The Netherlands

2. Safety-regions  Introduction  Why?  What problem had to be solved/what was our aim?  How did we try to do that; what is a safety-region actually  What have we achieved  Food for thought November 8 th - 9 th, 2012 Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region2

3. Safety-regions : why ?  Some major (near-) disasters  Boeing 747 crashes into Amsterdam (1992)  Evacuation due to high water (rivers) (1995)  Hercules crashes at Eindhoven Airport (1996)  Dakota crashes near Den Helder (1996)  Legionella contamination (1999)  Fireworks explosion Enschede (2000)  Major fire in bar Volendam (2001)  Shifting of a dyke near Wilnis (2003)  Fire in detention centre at Schiphol (2005)  Airline crash Schiphol (2009)  Assault on Queen’s day at Apeldoorn (2009)  Fire at Moerdijk (2011) November 8 th - 9 th, 2012 Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region3

4. What was our aim?  Better protection of civilians against risks;  Better relief in case of disaster or crisis  Centralized co-ordination (command and control) over fire- brigades, police-forces, medical services, crisismanagement and disaster relief actions  Enhanced administrative and operational power November 8 th - 9 th, 2012 Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region4

5. What is a Safety-region?  A safety-region is a mandatory cooperation of all municipalities in a region (25 in The Netherlands)  Safety-regions include:  All municipal firebrigades (to be reorganised into 25 regional fire brigades)  Medical aid organisation (direction only)  Control room  4 levels of co-ordination: GRIP 1-4  Mayor of “disaster location” is CinC in GRIP 1 -3  Mayor of main city is taking over in GRIP 4 November 8 th - 9 th, 2012 Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region5

6. Safetyregions and others? November 8 th - 9 th, 2012 Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region6 25 Safety regions, in addition to 12 provinces 8 plusregions 415 municipalities 10 judicial districts 10 police regions 19 environmental authorities 28 health regions 25 ambulance regions 27 local water boards 3 regional military commands

7. What have we achieved?  Awareness that a “multi-approach” is essential  New laws as of Oct 1 st 2010  All regions are/have  formally established  risk-analysis  policy-papers  disaster action plans  Multiservice training  Local knowledge and anchorage November 8 th - 9 th, 2012 Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region7

8. Food for thought  Focus on physical safety; social safety not included  Can safety be divided  How to raise sense of urgency  Physical disasters occur relatively seldom  Too much emphasis on riskmanagement and prevention, too little on consequence management November 8 th - 9 th, 2012 Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region8

9. Food for thought  Politicians are CinC (according to the law) but are they really up to that (do they have the capabilities?)  Do we really need 25 regions  Each region is relatively small, so chances of “bordercrossing” disasters and effects are high  Many officials are needed, must be trained and paid, but each has very few opportunities to have “live experiences”  Because of this: very few professionals, lots of “supplementary jobs” November 8 th - 9 th, 2012 Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region9

10. Food for thought  Organisational questions  Is it wise to combine operations; informationmanagement and “medical direction” in one organisation  Two essential partners are formally not branches of the safety-region,  Police (has other boundaries)  Environmental services  Military to be included?  Funding - imbalance in organisation  Fire brigades 10 (or more) times bigger than other branches of safety- regions  Safety-region is funded locally, police and military are funded nationally. Therefore : different stakeholders  Tendency to put high risk installations in sparsely populated area’s, therefore less funding for high risks November 8 th - 9 th, 2012 Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region10

11. Coordinated actions : GRIP GRIP: 4 phases of increasing seriousness 1. Incident with limited scale; source control only; but coordination between emergency services is necessary 2. Incident with both source and effect control; impact on surroundings 3. Incident of disaster that threatens well being of large groups of population within one municipality 4. Incident of disaster that threatens well being of large groups of population in several municipalities/regions. 5. Incident of disaster that threatens well being of large groups of population in the entire country or several countries. November 8 th - 9 th, 2012 Danish studytour to The Hague safety-region11

12. Questions 12