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ollowing a major incident, the Police, Fire and Rescue and Ambulance Services will undertake a review of how they handled the event, looking at all the aspects and resources involved. However, communications are often not reviewed in depth. To facilitate a more detailed review of communications, Airwave now offers to prepare and host a full review dedicated to assessing the use of and impact on the Airwave Network during a major incident. The rst of these reviews focussed on how the emergency services in Manchester managed communications over the Airwave Network during the response to the gas explosion in Oldham in June 2012. An unexpected event will always create traf c peaks on the Airwave Network, and by holding a speci c review with communications specialists from the emergency response agencies, we can look at what really happened. Using call data records from Airwave, and activity logs from the emergency responders, we can see how decisions affected the communications, and learn from them. By analysing the usage patterns

Some lessons learned from the Oldham Gas Blast Review:

» Communications decisions must be made as soon as possible. If an incident talkgroup is set up at the same time as the incident declared and the command centre initiated, network congestion can be avoided.

» During very high usage of the Network, users should press and hold the Press To Talk (PTT) button if they receive the queuing tone. They will then remain in the queue and be allocated a voice channel when available. Queuing is unusual, and the delay is normally just a few seconds even during major incidents.

» Notify Airwave of the incident as soon as possible. A call to either the Airwave major incident number, or standard Helpdesk number, will trigger Airwave’s Major Incident Process – see article on page 19.

of the emergency response teams in the hours following the report of the explosion, Airwave engineers were able to provide speci c data and highlight particular user behaviours. These were presented during the review meeting, which was attended

by Greater Manchester Police (GMP), North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) and Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (GM FRS). Ian Murgatroyd, Telecommunications Manager at GMP, said “The review of how the Airwave Network, and

24 | Reach Issue 5 2013

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