Emergency out of hours service

Routine emergencies

Medway Council operates out of hours emergency services that can be contacted through its central control (helpline) number at the foot of this page. Outside office hours, telephone calls come into the central control, where officers determine the nature of the emergency and pass it on to the appropriate duty officer for action. The only exception to this is calls for social care services, which are dealt with under an arrangement with Kent County Council. This service can be contacted on 0845 7626777.

The Regeneration and Development Directorate has an engineer on call to deal with highway-related issues and an officer on call to deal with environmental health emergencies. There is also an officer in the Community Services Directorate who is available to help homeless people.

For incidents where the precise nature of the problem is unknown, the central control operator may forward the problem on to a senior officer for a decision on the response required from the council. It may be that an officer is then asked to attend the incident to provide first-hand information to help determine the action necessary. This type of emergency call often originates from the police or other emergency services.

Warnings

Flood warnings issued by the Environment Agency, pollution reports issued by the Coastguard and severe weather warnings from the Meteorological Office are sent by fax to the central control on a 24 hour basis. Warnings are sent from there to the appropriate officers. Out of hours, these are dealt with initially by the duty engineer.

Major emergencies

Notification of a major emergency would normally come from the police. Unlike the normal out of hours emergency calls, all calls of this nature would go through to the central control, regardless of the time of day. Operators have a list of senior officers who would be contacted and some or all of the arrangements outlined in Medway Council's major emergency plan would be put into practice.

^ (back to top)