External Emergencies - Code Brown

The area of external emergencies is one that seems to cause some confusion more than fire or bomb threats. The reason for this is that External Emergencies mean different things to different sites. For those who have attended DELTRA Australia's Fire Safety Adviser course it comes as no surprise that a site risk assessment needs to be completed to identify which emergencies are most likely to occur at that site. If you live on a mountain, then flooding is not usually an issue. By the same token Bush fire is unlikely to occur to a building in the middle of the CBD. So likely external emergencies are dictated by our surrounds.

External Emergencies (aka Code Brown) can include any emergency coming from outside our site which causes us to have to initiate an emergency response. External Emergencies can include flooding, fire, bomb threat, chemical spill, storm, earthquake and many others. Obviously our emergency response will differ slightly with each of the types of emergencies. The reason is that we need to move people to safety and our 'point of safety' will differ for each of these emergencies. We cannot always send people to the external Assembly Area, as this may actually place people in greater danger than if they were to 'shelter in place'.

Hospitals have their own unique understanding of 'external emergency'. To a hospital a code brown means that an incident has occured off site and casualties will be arricing shortly. For this reason the emergency response undertaken by a hospital will be vastly different to other sites.

The story below is an example of an recent external emergency, in this case a 'dust storm'. How would an incident such as this affect your site?

Dust storm coats part of Snowy Mountains

September 22, 2008, 8:41 pm
Source: AAP

Parts of the Snowy Mountains are reportedly covered in "dirty snow" after dust storms from the Riverina and lower west deposited topsoil as a massive storm system crossed NSW.

The storm, which is heading for the NSW eastern seaboard, including Sydney, has kept State Emergency Service (SES) crews busy in western NSW with winds over 100 km/h tearing roofs off buildings and felling trees.

More than 150 requests for help have been made to the SES because of wind damage, abut 100 of them coming from the Broken Hill area.

Strong winds and some rain caused a large tree to fall and crush a car at Broken Hill, SES spokesman Phil Campbell said.

He said the Terminus Hotel at Hay and Tattersalls Hotel in Goulburn had been damaged in the storm.

Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) duty forecaster Peter Zmijewski said the storm brought wind gusts of more than 100 km/h through the state's southwest and left a coating of thin dust over the skifields.

"Some of the dust has settled over the Snowy Mountains so I imagine, where there is snow, it would be dirty," he said.

A severe weather warning has been issued for damaging winds and severe thunderstorm warnings are current for most of the state.

The Bureau said damaging winds had been recorded west of the Great Dividing Range.

Wind gusts of 115 km/h were recorded at Fowlers Gap, near Broken Hill.

Rain and thunderstorms are forecast for the northeast of the state.

The severe weather is expected to move to the southeast of the state and affect the Illawarra, southern Sydney suburbs and Central Tablelands on Tuesday before easing later in the day.

Hail is expected in the northwest of the state and gale warnings have been issued for Sydney, the south coast, the Hunter and the mid-north coast.