Making plans for an emergency or major disaster is part of Resilience Planning.
Resilience is the ability of the community, services, area or infrastructure to withstand the consequences of an incident. Traditionally Councils have always made plans to ensure that they can provide support and assist communities to get back to normal when disaster strikes. However, in November 2004 new legislation was passed following a review of emergency planning by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. The outcome of the review reinforced the governments view that existing legislation no longer provided an adequate framework for modern civil protection matters in the UK.
The Community Risk Register, which is published on the Local Resilience Forum (LRF) website|, lists scenarios that services hope they will never have to deal with.