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COUNCIL EMERGENCY PLANNING

Emergency planning for councils, with one picture for the incident room and the street.

When the river rises or the power goes, a council’s emergency response team has to know what is happening across the whole area. Sinkaos puts the incident team, highways and street crews, community flood wardens and volunteers on one live map, with tasks and a record that keep working when the mobile network does not.

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IN THE ROOM

The incident team sits in one room. The emergency is everywhere else.

In a district council the response is usually run by the emergency planning officer, a duty director, people from housing, highways and communications, and a liaison officer from the town or parish council who knows every lane. In a town council it may be the clerk, two councillors and the flood wardens. They know the place well. What they rarely have is a shared, current picture of it: which roads are shut, where the sandbags went, who has checked on the elderly couple by the mill stream, which rest centre still has camp beds.

That picture gets pieced together from phone calls, a whiteboard and the loggist’s notes. Updates arrive out of order, and once the mobile network is overloaded or the power is down even the calls stop. People outside carry on without knowing what the room has decided.

Afterwards the Local Resilience Forum, the insurers, the lead local flood authority and the full council all want the same thing: what was known, when, and what was done about it. By then the answers are spread across five phones and a flipchart.

FLOOD DAY

A flood day in a market town of 6,000 people.

  1. 05:40
    The warning comes in
    A Met Office rain warning and the upstream river gauge both sit as live sources in the town’s standing operation. The gauge crosses the level your plan treats as a trigger and an alert opens for the incident team.
    Official warningsSensorsAlerts
  2. 06:15
    The council stands up its response
    The operation already holds flood zones, evacuation routes, rest centre locations and the contact list from the emergency plan. Team members open it on their phones on the way in.
    TemplatesRolesLayers
  3. 07:00
    Crews go out with their own tasks
    Highways get the road closure at the bridge, the street team clears gullies, two council officers start door-knocking in the lower street. Each task sits on the map with an owner and a time it is due.
    TasksAcknowledgementLive location
  4. 08:20
    Volunteers join without accounts
    Twenty residents turn up at the town hall to help. They scan a QR code and join this operation only, as helpers, seeing just the sandbag points and their own jobs.
    Guest accessRoles
  5. 10:45
    The lower street loses signal
    The door-knocking team keeps logging who is staying, who has left and who needs transport. Their reports wait on the phones and land on the timeline at the time they were written.
    OfflineObservationsTwo timestamps
  6. 18:00
    Situation report to the LRF
    The team exports the day’s timeline, open tasks and map as a PDF for the multi-agency coordinating group and as the starting point for the recovery report.
    TimelineExport
Sources screen: a live drone feed, an orthophoto layer, a camera offline since 19:12, a river gauge chart at 182 cm rising towards the 200 cm watch threshold, and the area weather with a heavy rain warning.
River gauge and weather warning beside the map. Demo data.
FOR THE INCIDENT TEAM

What changes for the incident room and the people outside.

A standing operation for your area

Flood zones, evacuation routes, rest centres, water sources and vulnerable sites are on the map before anything happens. A template or the last exercise becomes today’s operation in a few minutes.

Tasks in place of ringing round

Every job has a place, an owner, a due time and an acknowledgement, so the room can see what is still open.

Reports with a photo and a position

Anyone in the field can log a blocked culvert or a resident who needs help. It becomes a record the team can act on and find again the next morning.

Works on a weak signal or none

Maps, tasks and the team list are on each phone. Reports queue and send when there is a link. A laptop field node can run the operation over local Wi-Fi with no internet at all.

Live context on the same map

Weather warnings, river gauges, road closures and cameras sit next to your people, and gauges can raise alerts at the trigger levels in your flood plan.

Partners for one incident only

Residents, a neighbouring council or a charity join by link or QR code with a limited role. Their access ends when the operation closes.

A record you can report from

Every report keeps the time it happened and the time it arrived. Replay the day, export the timeline and build the debrief from facts.

Your data, your rules

Hosted in the EU, on your own servers or on a disconnected node. Messages and files are end-to-end encrypted. Details on the security page.

WHO WORKS IN IT

One operation, a different view for each role.

INCIDENT ROOM
Emergency planning and the duty team
The whole picture: open incidents, tasks, positions, sources and the timeline. They decide and assign.
TOWN AND PARISH
Town or parish council and flood wardens
Their streets, the people they check on and the jobs they took on, on the map the district team sees. Useful for a community emergency plan that has to work on the day.
CREWS
Highways, street teams and contractors
Gullies, pumps, closures and repairs as tasks with photos, so the room knows what is done.
HELPERS
Volunteers and voluntary sector partners
A narrow role with only what they need: where to go, what to do and who they report to.
OUT OF SCOPE

What it leaves to others.

It does not warn the public

Sinkaos is not a public warning system. Emergency Alerts on mobile phones, Environment Agency flood warnings, local radio and your social channels stay as they are.

It is not emergency dispatch

Emergency calls go to 999 or 112 and the emergency services. Sinkaos coordinates your own people and does not take over the work of the blue light services.

It does not write your emergency plan

It holds the plan’s maps, contacts and task templates and makes them usable on the day. The plan itself stays yours, and our emergency plan guide can help with it.

It needs charged phones

Offline mode does nothing for a flat battery. Plan power banks and a charging point in the incident room.

IN COUNCILS

What towns and districts run in it.

River and surface water floodingStorm damageProlonged power cutLoss of mains waterEvacuation and rest centresDoor-knockingSandbags and pumpsMissing person search supportTown eventsEmergency exercises
QUESTIONS

What councils usually ask us.

Do officers and volunteers need training?
The field app is built to be used under stress, with tasks, reports and the map one tap away. Most people are working after a short briefing. During early access we set up the first operation with you.
Can we use it outside emergencies?
Yes. Town events, winter gritting and exercises run the same way, so people know the tool before a real incident.
Can we share the picture with the LRF or the fire and rescue service?
You can invite people from other organisations as guests with a limited role, and export the timeline and map as PDF, GeoJSON or CSV.
Where is our data stored?
In EU data centres by default, or on your own servers if your policies require it. See deployment.
Does it replace our decision log?
Every decision, task and report is timestamped and exportable, which makes the loggist’s job and the final report easier. Your formal decision log stays the record of what was decided and why.
RELATED

Run your next emergency exercise on Sinkaos.

Tell us about your council and your next exercise. Early access is free, and we set up the first operation with you.