Sam Townend, Emergency Planning & Resilience Manager from SP Electricity North West.

Our latest #LRFPeople story features Sam Townend, Emergency Planning & Resilience Manager from SP Electricity North West.

Sam has been in the role for the past three years after joining from the Environment Agency (EA) where he worked in their Incident Management team.

Like many emergency planning officers in the LRF, Sam’s role is very much a labour of love after studying risk and environmental hazards at university and joining the EA after a spell working in the insurance industry.

Now his role covers a wide remit across a large area including several resilience forums as well as Lancashire where he serves as Chair of the Utilities sub group while also chairing the region’s Category 2 Responder group.

Talking about his day-to-day work he said: “The job is constantly changing and extremely varied, working on making the electricity network as resilient as possible in liaising with emergency planners from across the North West.

“Although I wasn’t in post at the time it will be 10 years since Storm Desmond caused huge issues in areas such as Lancaster and obviously in more recent times we had Storm Arwen which hit Cumbria in particular and it is more important than ever that we learn from those incidents and draw up plans to reduce the effect similar storms may have in the future.

“In Storm Desmond as an example, the Lancaster sub station, which is close to the River Lune was flooded and power was lost. There are approximately 35,000 substations in the North West, meaning inevitably some had to be built close to rivers in the past and a lot of work has been – and continues to be - undertaken to make them more resilient to flooding in the future.

“One of our major focuses within the LRF at the moment is a new National Power Outage plan supporting strong and consistent processes across the country and that work will hopefully come to fruition next year.’’

The loss of power and the effect it would have on people’s normal everyday lives is something that Sam focuses on closely as part of his job.

He said: “Looking after and protecting the public is a vital part of this role. It is important that people know what to do to prepare for a possible lack of power and how to react if it happens. We do know that people are more aware of possible emergencies because there has been more major incidents in recent years but not everyone knows what to do if they happen and that is why we are doing so much work in that area.

“There’s lots of advice on our website and we work hard to promote the 105 emergency phone number and promote our Extra Care Register which those people who may struggle more in a power cut can sign up to to ensure they are supported as much as possible in any potential outage.

“It is this part of the job – looking after people and supporting them at a time of need - that I particularly enjoy and I know it is the way that the vast majority of emergency planners think too.

“Most of the people I know in emergency planning and in the LRF want to make a difference and help our communities and that is why I think so many of us bond so well.

“That togetherness can be seen throughout the Lancashire Resilience Forum – and the other LRFs I work with - and that is something that constantly shines through.

“We spend 99 per cent of our time preparing for the other one per cent of our work – a potential emergency, but that is what the job is about and why it matters so much.’’