AS PART of the council’s seasonal response efforts they have opened a new multi-agency command centre (MACC) which is operating from a central seafront location.

Home to staff from the council, police, coastguard, RNLI and security teams, the MACC carries out surveillance and response across the conurbation.

Staffing numbers can be scaled-up when the town approaches certain trigger points which are determined using live road cameras, hospitality bookings, transport arrivals and weather.

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During crucial times the MACC holds twice daily virtual and in person briefings to all operational staff - the centre is operational seven-days a week from 6am to 11pm.

As the council gets busier they involve wider partners: SWAST, coastguard, communications, business and transportation partners, cleansing.

Sophie Ricketts, head of seasonal response at BCP said: “The purpose of declaring a major incident is to get all of these people around the table.

“The thing we’re doing this year is bringing them in from the beginning so we have that multi-agency working, so by the time you’ve got 60 to 70,000 people on Bournemouth Pier, you know that we’ve got our police responses and we’ve scaled up all of our resources so that we prevent it from getting to that escalation point.”

The MACC opened on March 29, before the first bank holiday weekend, and hopes to stay open as a seasonal task force throughout the years to come.

Dorset Police Chief Inspector Adrian Thompson said: “We are all working together and this system we have in place is absolutely fantastic.

“It gives us an opportunity to protect our resources and serve demand without taking away from that - with the support of the ambulance service and fire service as well so I really would support this being here much longer.

“We are replicating something very similar in the county part of Dorset, using a similar approach out there which has been replicated from this model so I can’t ever see this going.”

The council invested £3.5million into the MACC and additional infrastructure needed to support it - including installing new CCTV and thermal imaging cameras.

They are also launching a new app at the end of the month which will allow the public to report an issue using their mobile phone, which will be dealt with ‘live’ by the MACC team.