Posted By Kate Graham Yes, our definition of off-site incident includes incidents that have not had off-site effects yet but that could develop in this way.

Posted By Carrell Thanks Kate, that's pretty much how I see it too (for all the emergency services). It's just a discussion we're having whilst reviewing our on-site procedure - consensus is that considering we're in a retained emergency services area and the speed at which an incident could escalate we should at least inform all services that something is going on if they feel the need to prepare themselves. Its a tough one.

Posted By Goalie We are very fortunate and have a very good local partnership system with all of the other COMAH sites in our area (plus the police / fire / hospital teams). So, it's fairly clearly defined for us when we would / wouldn't call in external assistance. Basically, if there is a real risk of an off-site impact, then yes, we would contact external resources to prepare them. If it's just a 'maybe', then we wouldn't. Our 'COMAH' scenarios have all been pre-risk assessed. If anything were to happen outwith of a predefined scenario, we have a team of on-call personnel who have been trained to make a decision based on the actual event. It might be worth reviewing your emergency reponse plans and for the potentially 'higher risk' ones, ask the local emergency services if they would like to be contacted if the event were to happen. We've got to the place where they are asking us to take new recruits around, so they can physically show them the issues (and obvioulsy it benefits us if the emergency teams are familiar with our site). I would certainly recommend this if your site management allows it! Hope this helps !