andrewlighten.com

You might remember that a month or so back I was whining about map quality and about the way Google maps showed a second cemetery where one didn’t exist? Well, Brad corrected me in a comment on that post, and I visited the place where he suggested I could find some indications of the cemetery.

The cemetery isn’t really visible from the top of the hill, but at the bottom there are some signs to indicate where it was.

Right at the centre of this picture, between the trees, you can just make out the left edge of Bristol Hill tower. I’ll do a separate shoot of the tower one day; it’s a nice spot. There’s a plaque in the stone monument off to the right. I’ve processed it in high contrast black and white to make the text easier to read.

As the text at the bottom says, there are at least 400 other people believe to be buried here. If you look at how small the hill is it’s almost hard to believe. There can’t be much space between the graves at all. It would be interesting to get Tony Robinson’s Time Team people to visit and do some ground radar work here.

Why have so many societies settled on red and green to distinguish between danger and safety when these are exactly the two colours that most people with colour blindness are unable to tell apart?

Yesterday afternoon I attended a MECC Information Session in the local council chambers.

A MECC is a Municipal Emergency Coordination Centre. This is an element of the emergency management planning that is undertaken at various levels within government and community based organisations. The Emergency Services Commissioner sits at the top of the planning hierarchy, and those of us in the trenches (SES, Police, CFA, DSE, Red Cross, district hospitals, etc) are at the bottom.

There’s a lot of planning undertaken behind the scenes so that everyone in the emergency services ecosystem knows what to do when we’re hit with events like last February’s bushfires. This planning has certainly become more intense as a result of the ongoing Royal Commission into the handling of those bushfires, but it’s certainly not new.

What is a MECC, and who is in it?

The MECC is a local council based centre. It’s headed by a group of three key people known as the MERC (the municipal emergency response coordinator), the MERO (the municipal emergency resource officer) and the MRM (the municipal recovery manager). Each has a different role.

• The MERC is typically the person who has overall responsibility for managing the emergency. In our council area it’s the senior officer at the police station (right now, Acting Inspector Paul Huggett).
• The MERO is the person who is responsible for coordinating the acquisition and deployment of resources used to respond to the emergency – whether they’re things that are needed to handle the emergency itself or things that are needed to assist in the recovery operations. In a flood, for example, the MERO will be the person who needs to coordinate sand, sandbags, mapping data about which areas needed to be protected, etc, but they’re also going to work on finding relief centres and housing for those who are temporarily displaced. For us this is Ron Potter; his day job is the town planner, so he’s perfectly suited to being our MERO.
• The MRM is the person who is responsible for recovering from emergencies. He’ll work closely with both the MERC and the MERO to do what’s required for recovery. The thinking these days (and rightly so) is that recovery starts the moment the ball is bounced, so even while an emergency is unfolding recovery has started alongside the management of the emergency itself. UPDATE: Our MRM is John Kelly. His email address indicates he works for the local council, but I know nothing about him.

As well as the MERC, the MERO and the MRM, the MECC will be staffed with Liaison Officers (LO’s) from the various emergency services that are involved in the emergency. As one of the emergency service organisations that has a role in emergency management, we’ll typically have an LO in the MECC if we’re involved. To be able to do that you need to know what the MECC is and how it operates.

I had a rough idea of what the MECC did, having been in and out of the Beechworth MECC many times during the time I spent there during the February fire events. What I didn’t see there, however, was the way the various people in the MECC communicated with each other and how those communications formally occurred so that you can track everything that’s being requested, offered, and updated, and how those communications must be vigorously controlled and audited so they provide what is essentially legal documentation of the MECC’s decisions and proceedings. The bushfire Royal Commission, for example, is looking at all sorts of documentation from coordination centres across the affected areas to see what happened.

Bigger picture?

A MECC is a coordination centre. It’s all about getting the various organisations and people involved in the emergency talking to each other and making sure that tasks that need to occur can actually occur. It doesn’t actually do anything, however – it just arranges for things to be done.

If a MECC has been activated it will typically be liaising with one or more ICCs. An ICC is an Incident Control Centre, and that typically sits between the MECC and the actual emergency itself.

Here’s an example. For weather related events (storm, flood, etc) the SES is the control agency. For major events our unit headquarters will be the ICC, and the MECC will be activated to support the work we’re doing. One of our members will sit in the MECC as the SES Liaison Officer and be our interface to the things the MECC can do – acquire resources we need to manage the flood and assist in deploying those resources.

Documents

The Emergency Management Australia website has lots of documentation on how all this stuff works. I have a bit of reading to do.