Don’t assume help will come: Brits warned to prepare for emergencies without power, water or phones
Article featured on LBC website.
Written by EJ Ward @EJWardNews
The warning comes amid growing concern about the resilience of the UK to everything from extreme weather and prolonged power failures to cyberattacks, sabotage, and hostile state activity.
Brits need to get used to the idea that during a major national emergency they may have to look after themselves for a period of time, with electricity, communications, water, payments and other services potentially unavailable, one of the country's leading resilience experts has warned.
Lord Harris, chairman of the National Preparedness Commission, told LBC that Britain needs to build a culture in which households understand they cannot always assume that somebody will immediately arrive to fix things when a serious crisis hits.
His warning comes amid growing concern about the resilience of the UK to everything from extreme weather and prolonged power failures to cyberattacks, sabotage and hostile state activity, with Lord Harris warning that although Britain's preparedness has improved, the threats facing the country are developing at an extraordinary pace.
For ordinary households, however, the message is considerably simpler. People need to become more comfortable with the possibility that the services they normally rely upon may disappear temporarily, and be sufficiently prepared that they can cope when they do.
Lord Harris warned that a widespread electricity failure, for example, would not simply leave homes without lights.
Mobile communications could begin failing as backup batteries at phone masts ran down, water supplies could be affected because pumps require electricity, wastewater and sewage systems could experience problems, and electronic payments and other parts of the financial system could stop working normally.
“All of the things that we just take for granted would fail,” he said. “We all need to be prepared for those circumstances when the things we just take for granted are no longer available.”
His warning is not that Britain is about to descend into a survivalist nightmare, but that households need enough resilience to cope with disruption without immediately becoming dependent on already stretched emergency services.
“We're not talking about necessarily six-month supplies in your basements and enough guns to deal with an invading army,” Lord Harris said.
Instead, he said people should be “more prepared for a disruption so you're not completely thrown if you can't boil water or you can't do whatever else it might be.”
That could mean households having basic supplies available, knowing how they would communicate with family members if mobile networks were unavailable, and thinking beforehand about what they would do if electricity, water or electronic payments stopped working.
More importantly, Lord Harris argues, preparedness needs to become normal.
He said officials had historically been nervous about encouraging households to prepare because of fears that the public would either mock the advice or assume the Government knew that some catastrophe was imminent.
The warning comes as the Government prepares a much wider effort to encourage the public to become more resilient.
Its latest Resilience Action Plan implementation report says new household advice will be backed by a multi-year public campaign later this year, aimed at explaining simple steps people can take to prepare for emergencies.
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Want to know more?
https://nationalpreparednesscommission.uk/
