The importance of communities and volunteers coming together to help each other plan and prepare for any potential emergencies has never been more important.

The UK Government Resilience Action Plan, promotes a “whole-of-society’’ approach to making communities more resilient and better able to respond effectively to potential issues such as a weather emergency, a flood, or a power outage.

One such community who has taken on this challenge head on is Overton, near Morecambe, whose residents came together after Storm Desmond in December 2015 resulted in a loss of power in the village.

Thanks largely to the inspirational work of one resident, the late Danny Maddox, a Community Emergency Response Group made up of volunteers from the village was set up to develop a scheme aimed at supporting residents to help each other should a similar situation ever occur.

The group developed the Overton Community Emergency (Initial Response) Plan which is now there to be used in extreme circumstances where emergency services may be unable to reach the village immediately. In these cases, the initial response may rely entirely on Overton residents, and the plan describes how such an initial response will be set up and co-ordinated. 

The plan itself calls for Overton to have five residents as emergency co-ordinators, meaning the village should have at least one emergency co-ordinator in, or close to, the village at any one time assisted by an emergency plan secretary.

One of the co-ordinators is Alan Scarr.

He said: “We set the group up after the floods in Lancaster in 2015. The village lost power in the storms so there were issues with no telephones and no power, and this was a real issue for a place like ours which has quite a lot of elderly residents.

“After the storms died down a few of us felt we needed to do something in case the same thing happened again in the future. We had a public meeting set up by Danny Maddox who was chair of the parish council at the time which was really well attended and from that we formed a voluntary group. Mark Bartlett, the then emergency planning lead at Lancaster City Council, supported us in a big way and we wrote two plans, one for us and one for our neighbours in Sunderland Point who have similar needs but also have the added fact problem in that they are cut off by the Morecambe Bay tides at various times.

“The plans go together well because if there was a need for the emergency services in Sunderland Point we have protocols in place to get people there overland and we have a system in place to keep both villages in contact with each other thanks to the ERAL phone system, funded by the Lancashire Resilience Forum telecoms group, which means that we can be in touch no matter what the conditions are.

Fellow resident Michael McTague helped set up the original plan and says: “Basically the key word is resilience, so we are covered if we were cut off through water or electricity.

“It is all about people coming together and supporting each other to cope if there were to be any problems.

“Everyone chips in and helps, and we are very lucky to be in a farming community because if there is a problem the farmers here just get things done.

“As an example, a tree blew down and blocked the road recently and one of our farmers just sorted it and got the road open before the council could get here. Another recent incident led to there being a lot of surface water around the village, but a local farmer just got rid of it quickly.

“It is that sort of village and shows how important it is for everyone to work together at the times of biggest need.’’