Cayman has been quite fortunate within the past 20 years.
Over those two decades, RCIPS Chief Inspector Angelique Howell says there really hasn’t been what law enforcement would consider a “mass casualty” incident.
It’s not a topic most people like to think about, Chief Inspector Howell says. It means multiple deaths and injuries from incidents like plane crashes, sinking cruise ships, major hurricanes that wreak destruction upon the Islands.
These types of events tend to stretch the resources of police, fire, ambulance, hospitals and 911 services to the limit. They also typically bring a bevy of telephone calls that fall upon the shoulders of emergency personnel who have their hands full with the primary duty of saving lives.
Chief Inspector Howell says Cayman does have experience with such a situation where communication lines broke down and confusion ensued, even though it cost comparatively few lives – Hurricane Ivan in September 2004.
“Ivan wasn’t a mass casualty situation, but with Ivan you had people calling and saying ‘I can’t find this one, or can’t find that one’,” she says. “So [a mass casualty bureau call centre] would still serve a purpose.”
Howell and the RCIPS are working on the creation of a volunteer-led call centre in case the worst should happen. The centre would consist of about 25 civilian volunteers or special constables (unpaid volunteer police officers] whose job it would be to accept phone calls coming in from all over the world in the aftermath of such an event.
The centre would function as part of local law enforcement’s mass casualty bureau and would report to local police detectives.
“So that people can call the police department from all over the world and report somebody missing,” Howell says. “We will be taking all the information, both of the person calling and the person they are looking for.”
This is a tricky job, Howell admits. Individuals calling the police department during such a situation will be nervous or even frantic. They will typically have heard reports of a major incident occurring in the jurisdiction and, if they haven’t heard from friends or loved ones, will want to know where they are located.
Calls will frequently come in to various places; police stations, hospitals, government offices. Howell says the idea here will be to route all calls to a main police department number, which will then send people seeking information to the call centre.
“We ask for names, phone numbers, descriptions [of the missing person], anything peculiar about the person like tattoo, birthmarks,” she says. “We will match that information with what we found here…and if there’s an identification that can take place, then we will have another set of people that are responsible for calling back to say ‘we have found your father, we have found your brother’.”
Howell says there will hopefully be three separate teams working in the volunteer call centre. The first will be the call takers that have initial contact with the public, both international and local, who are seeking information on a missing person. They are trained to take down as much information about the person as possible and contact details for the individual who is calling in.
That information then gets passed along to a collation team that will organise it and report to police officers and detectives handling the situation at various intervals. A third team will then be charged with calling back the individuals who contacted the call centre and providing any updates possible.
“It’s going to take at least 25 [people],” she says. “It’s a big function. You’ll have at least ten people answering phones, taking information; then you want that information to go to another set of people that are going to sort it; then you’ll have another set of people who call back with information.”
There will also have to be at least a few people stationed at the Cayman Islands hospital to help route calls and take down information.
Assuming there hasn’t been major damage from hurricane or other natural disaster, Howell says the plan will be to operate the call centre from the police training unit at Governors Square.
Howell says the operation still needs more volunteers, especially those with foreign language skills. For the time being, contingency plans are in place in case of an emergency situation.
“We will try our best to obtain a phone number from the person as well as what language they speak,” she says. “If they can’t understand us at all, we will try to send them to their country’s embassy for information.”
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