Community comes together to prepare for any potential emergency

A number of community stakeholders came together earlier this month to ensure that the communities of Test Valley are prepared in the case of an emergency.

The Test Valley Resilience Forum, held twice a year, sees a number of representatives from town and parish councils and local resilience forums come together with representatives of Test Valley Borough Council, Hampshire County Council, the Environment Agency, Hampshire Constabulary and Hampshire Fire and Rescue to discuss preparations for major incidents.

Earlier this November, in King’s Somborne, the Resilience Forum simulated an exercise in which a local water supply was contaminated.

A number of parishes that already have local resilience plans in place were able to test their effectiveness on the day. Other parishes and communities were encouraged to develop plans of their own.         

Councillor Lashbrook, TVBCs Resilience Champion and chair of the Forum  said: “The Forum is a great place for communities to learn from one another and it goes from strength to strength. We have our origins from the floods in 2014 and we are now in our fourth year of activity. As we learnt in 2014 the communities that were best prepared to deal with the floods were those who had already created resilience plans of some nature.

“Importantly this forum has been a proper partnership between communities and statutory agencies and I think we have something quite unique here. I am very proud to say that as a result, Test Valley now has more community-based resilience plans in place than other parts of the county. We are much, much stronger together.”

Last Updated: 14 November 2018