Experienced emergency planning officers and safety officers may wish to use it as a check list.

The council's emergency planning officer, Mike Hill, said: 'High tides alone don't necessarily mean flooding, there has to be a combination of winds and tides, and this may not happen.

Long retired from his career as an emergency planning officer, for which he was appointed OBE, he is in good spirits, but is recovering from a hip operation, making long journeys difficult.

When the county's energetic emergency planning officer, Dr Alan Jones, went through it, he was amazed: for example, two of the local assembly points, where people were supposed to collect in the event of an evacuation, no longer existed.

Each responder has an emergency planning officer (sometimes called a civil protection officer, civil contingencies officer, resilience officer, or risk manager) who is usually responsible for ensuring their organisation is in compliance with the Act and sharing information with other responders.

Early research at the NWRRL focused on developing a GIS for use by the police and county emergency planning officers in Cumbria that would aid in the management of a possible explosion at a chemical factory in Whitehaven, west Cumbria (Vincent et al.1988; Dunn 1989).