UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT of ORAL EVIDENCE to Be Published As HC 484-Iii

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 484-iii

HOUSE OF COMMONS

ORAL EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

SCOTTISH AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

POWER OUTAGES IN THE WEST OF SCOTLAND

WEDNESDAY 10 JULY 2013

ELMA MURRAY, ALISTAIR SPEEDIE and IAN CARRUTHERS

Evidence heard in Public Questions 234 - 319

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Scottish Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 10 July 2013

Members present:

Mr Alan Reid (Chair) Mike Crockart Jim McGovern Graeme Morrice Pamela Nash Lindsay Roy

______

In the absence of the Chair, Mr Reid was called to the Chair

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Elma Murray, Chief Executive, North Ayrshire Council, Alistair Speedie, Director of Planning and Environment Services, Dumfries and Galloway Council, and Ian Carruthers, Dumfries and Galloway Council, gave evidence.

Q234 Chair: Thank you all very much for coming to help us with our inquiry into the power cuts that happened back in March. Would you start off by introducing yourselves, please? Ian Carruthers: My name is Ian Carruthers, member of Dumfries and Galloway Council and Chair of the Planning, Housing and Environment Committee, which this subject lies under. I am here to take on any political views or points. I have Mr Speedie here to take care of the detail and such like. Thank you very much for inviting me. Alistair Speedie: I am Alistair Speedie, Director of Planning and Environment Services for Dumfries and Galloway Council. I have a number of responsibilities in my portfolio. With respect to events such as the snow we had in March, I chair the recovery group. During a response to such an event, I am very much responsible for business continuity, and once the response hands over to the recovery, I then chair the recovery group. Elma Murray: Thank you, Chair and Committee, for inviting me here today. I am Elma Murray. I am the Chief Executive of North Ayrshire Council. As such, I take the lead role for any management of civil and emergency control matters.

Q235 Chair: Could you start off by explaining what your council’s priorities were after we had the snowfall back in March? It does not matter who leads off. Elma Murray: From our perspective in North Ayrshire, when the emergency starts, clearly, the police take the lead because the police, as far as emergency planning is concerned, will take the lead during the emergency stage. The council kicks in to take the lead during the recovery stage of any emergency or civil contingency matter. In terms of our priorities during the emergency stage, they were twofold. The first was predominantly to clear roads to allow access for any other services. The second was care of people.

Alistair Speedie: It was very much the same for us, Chair. Our priorities were to deal with our communities under such circumstances, particularly identifying vulnerable people in need, etc. Obviously, to get to these people and communities, we had to clear the roads very quickly to achieve a response.

Q236 Lindsay Roy: What plans did you have in place to deal with severe weather, and how fit for purpose were they, on reflection? Elma Murray: We have a generic civil contingency plan in place which is well tested and well used. We did not just have severe weather this year; we have had severe weather in other parts of North Ayrshire over the two preceding years during which I have been chief executive, so we have put our plans into action on more than one occasion. In terms of the situation in relation to Arran though, which I believe is what the Committee’s attention is focused on today, then clearly we had an extra matter to consider which was in relation to the fact that it was an island community and getting services to and from the island also presents its own specific challenges. The emergency planning procedures worked well, in that the police did take the lead in terms of the initial emergency response, together with all partners, including any of the wider partners. Obviously there was SSE, because that was one of the major issues that we had on the island. The community, the health board and so on were also all part of our emergency response. We ran the emergency response as a standard emergency, where we had a number of emergency meetings. In fact, on the very first day, we had between five and six emergency meetings. That was on the Friday. We reduced those slightly over the weekend, as we started to make progress in terms of dealing with particularly the roads issue and providing access to other services. Later on in the week, when the council took over lead responsibility for the recovery, that was again very well documented as part of our civil contingency procedure. Our emergency planning procedures worked well and we followed those. We have undertaken a review of our emergency planning procedures. There are lessons to be learned, as there always are with any emergency. We believe that we can always make improvements and that we should use any event to learn from that and see how we can improve. We have done that and there are two or three issues that we have identified and that we now want to take forward following that.

Q237 Lindsay Roy: I will come back to you on that in a minute once I get a response from your colleagues. Alistair Speedie: Dumfries and Galloway Council operates a major emergency scheme, which is well tried and tested. It goes back a number of years in its development, especially after the Lockerbie air disaster. It has been well tested through foot and mouth and obviously through a number of major snow and flood events. The support mechanisms include the council’s emergency centre in Dumfries, the emergency response environment that we have, local response team arrangements and the council emergency centre information cell. That is a cell that we deploy whenever we have a weather warning. It is a graduated response and the implementation plan we operate depends on whether it is a yellow, amber or red alert. We have support arrangements that we cascade into functional teams. The benefit of these generic plans and functional teams means that we have the same people in charge of these functional teams giving us continuity and familiarity. We have a single-room management. We have communications links with Government in these situations. We have Government support and operate and deploy mutual aid where required. I would say that it is very fit for purpose and it proves very successful in these situations.

Q238 Lindsay Roy: In essence, then, your emergency planning procedure is fit for purpose. The generic and slim-line planning approach seemed to be appropriate. What lessons were learned in addition to the framework you already had in place? Alistair Speedie: If I may say, Chair, in this case, we did not call a major emergency scheme. We did not deploy that in this case. It was very much concentrated in the west of our area, so we operated it through local response teams, with the council’s emergency centre co- ordinating in Dumfries. Maybe we should have deployed the full emergency scheme, but we didn’t. It lasted from Friday 22 March and it was mostly over by the evening of Monday 24 March. We deployed the recovery group on 26 March.

Q239 Lindsay Roy: So that was a judgment call? Alistair Speedie: It was a judgment call, yes.

Q240 Lindsay Roy: Have you reviewed the way in which a judgment call would be made in future? Alistair Speedie: Yes. These events are all very different. That is the essence of having a generic plan and having a flexible scheme that addresses whatever event comes along. Again, yes, we will look at that very closely. Of course, the whole environment is changing with the single police force. Before, we had co-terminus boundaries with the Dumfries and Galloway constabulary, so we will review that element as well going forward. Ian Carruthers: I would make a small comment on that. One of the things we did pick up on was that we got a yellow alert from the Met Office. We thought that that was maybe a little bit of a weak response from it. If it had been an amber, we probably would have gone to major.

Q241 Lindsay Roy: Have you been back to the Met Office about that? Ian Carruthers: I am not 100% sure about that. You may have picked up on that, Alistair. Alistair Speedie: Yes, these are issues that we constantly discuss with the Met Office to update the information it gives. Basically, we need it on a risk-assessment basis. With snow in a certain area, that area may be familiar to heavy snowfall, but certainly the very west of our area was not used to such heavy snowfall.

Q242 Lindsay Roy: It is a difficult one to call because you don’t want to be alarmist or complacent. Alistair Speedie: That is correct, but we want to be ready and we need as much advance warning as possible.

Q243 Chair: Do you know off the top of your head how many yellow alerts you get in one year? Alistair Speedie: It is numerous. I could not put my hand on my heart and say—

Q244 Chair: So there was no way of knowing at the beginning that this yellow alert was out of the ordinary compared to the many numerous ones you get? Would that be a fair comment? Alistair Speedie: With the yellow alert on 22 March, from an operational point of view, we faced a growing event. From an operational point of view, it was normal operational matters and resources that were deployed. As the day went on and there was a creep, we understood that something bigger was developing and that we had better get better organised.

Q245 Lindsay Roy: Elma, were lessons learned in North Ayrshire? Elma Murray: We had similar issues to the ones that my colleagues have already raised this afternoon, particularly in relation to the weather information that we had. That is not a criticism of anybody. It surprised everyone in terms of the type of weather that we experienced. For the Committee’s information, I personally don’t receive yellow alerts. I only receive amber alerts because that is when we ramp things up a scale in terms of our emergency operations. An amber alert would mean that I would be on almost like emergency watch at that stage. That had not happened at all by the Friday morning. In terms of the lessons learned though, one is generic, but two are very specific to the island itself and what we would want to do to boost the resilience of the island and how it responds to emergencies. The first of those was in relation to how we dealt with general communications about what was happening, mainly with the media and the wider public. Certainly, with communications, we felt that there could have been a stronger lead from the emergency group that was meeting. We had our first multi-agency teleconference to manage the emergency at 11 o’clock on 22 March. We did start to have that quite early on in terms of the emergency itself. In relation to how we then communicated that to a broader range of stakeholders, that did not kick in until much later on in the emergency operation itself.

Q246 Lindsay Roy: Were there issues around power cuts as well? Elma Murray: It was not so much the power cuts on the island that I am referring to there; it is more the wider communications across other emergency support bodies within Scotland. For example, it is the extent we engaged with Transport Scotland to achieve assistance. I have to say that Transport Scotland did come back very quickly when we asked for support and assistance. Generally, just getting the emergency planning community in Scotland more aware of what was happening, that did not happen as quickly as we would have liked. Generally, our communications with the media were not as quick as we would like, on reflection. The other two issues that we have identified were these. In terms of how we control and manage an emergency from the island of Arran, the council has an operation called the outdoor education centre. It would have been helpful if we had been able to ramp that up to become an island emergency control centre, but we did not have the facility to be able to turn the outdoor education centre into that type of operation, due to the power constraints on the island. That is something that we are looking at trying to make changes to now. The other issue is generally around the resilience of the island and the communities on the island. With a more fragile area like an island, you do have to help the local communities to be more resilient in themselves, rather than necessarily depending on the authorities and the other services.

Q247 Lindsay Roy: Are you now building up community networks? Elma Murray: Yes. To be fair, we had started that before the emergency in March, but we feel that we can strengthen that considerably. We have taken steps to start to do that. I have to say that community groups and networks have responded to that initial work particularly well. The way in which we organise service delivery on the island is different from the way in which we organise it on the mainland. We have almost like an island team that covers a whole range of services and they work much more closely than perhaps functional teams would on the mainland. We have two senior island officers on Arran. We have taken steps now to train them more fully in emergency planning and civil emergency procedures than we had done prior to this.

Q248 Lindsay Roy: Were there any issues around support for vulnerable and disabled people? Elma Murray: Yes, there were issues, particularly on the west of the island, which was cut off for a number of days because of the volume of snow and drifts that had taken place and our ability to cut through all of that. We did have a number of concerns about vulnerable people. We were able to contact staff who live on the west side of the island, who were able to make house calls. We also used the mountain rescue team that is on the island. We also managed to use the local police and, where necessary, any other members of the community that were able to get out and about to check on local people. We were encouraging people to do that. All of the information that I have shows that every vulnerable person was visited at least once a day during the very extreme period.

Q249 Lindsay Roy: To build on that, you are now developing community resilience networks? Elma Murray: Yes; that is correct. Lindsay Roy: That’s helpful.

Q250 Jim McGovern: When you say that everyone was visited at least once a day, do you mean by the authorities? Elma Murray: I mean by someone who could ascertain whether or not the individual required further help. It might not necessarily have been the local authority, but it would be someone whom we trusted to be able to do that.

Q251 Jim McGovern: Namely? Elma Murray: There are a number of community groups. As I have explained, there is the Arran resilience work that we have been doing with our communities in Arran. It would be members of the community that are known to us, who would be able to go out and visit local people that we know are potentially vulnerable.

Q252 Jim McGovern: Are these people authorised or unauthorised? Elma Murray: In some cases, they would be authorised because it would be the police or mountain rescue, and I would say they would be authorised.

Q253 Jim McGovern: Certainly; yes. Elma Murray: In some cases, it would be friends, or people that you might call “buddies” if you like, that we know through our social services and likely to be able to provide support and help to people in these more remote areas.

Q254 Jim McGovern: Presumably, these people could not be criticised if something went wrong? Elma Murray: Absolutely not. They would just be going out to check that people are okay. If they needed more support, they would get in touch with the services to put in place appropriate support arrangements. Q255 Jim McGovern: It is just a case of looking after your next-door neighbour? Elma Murray: Yes, some of that.

Q256 Lindsay Roy: Mr Speedie, what about the vulnerable and disabled people in your communities?

Alistair Speedie: We operate a database of persons at risk, which we share through a data protection sharing agreement. We quickly identified those at risk and these were targeted to make sure that they were okay.

Q257 Lindsay Roy: Things worked well and there were few complaints. Alistair Speedie: There were few complaints.

Q258 Chair: In the past, concerns have been raised with us that the Data Protection Act causes problems with regard to registers of vulnerable people and passing these registers on to other agencies or local volunteers. Have you found the Data Protection Act to be a problem in this regard? Alistair Speedie: In Dumfries and Galloway, we have not found it a particular problem. We have a sharing agreement, whereby we can share it with particular agencies that have signed that agreement. We are working with the NHS to try and expand that database and that work is ongoing.

Q259 Chair: You mentioned earlier that at the beginning of the emergency the police take the lead role and then it passes to the council. Can you explain at what point lead responsibility passes from the police to the council? When I ask a general question, anybody that wants to jump, just jump in. Elma Murray: That is something that would be standard across Scotland with regard to the lead in any emergency situation. An emergency being dealt with would normally be the police or one of the other blue-light services as appropriate. Normally speaking, it is the police. We reach agreement with the police when the initial emergency has come to an end. So we have managed to deal with the emergency and now we are on to recovery and trying to get back to normal. The minute we get to the point of recovery, then the local authority would normally be the agency that would take over that work.

Q260 Chair: Is it the police or yourselves that decide this, or is there agreement between the two? Elma Murray: It is mutual agreement, and it is a judgment.

Q261 Chair: What criteria are laid down for the point at which you decide to move from emergency to recovery? Elma Murray: It is just a description whether it is an emergency or whether you are into the recovery stage. Once the roads were open, for example—in fact, not even when we had all of the power on; we were still in a position where we did not have all the power restored to Arran—I felt that the council was in a position to undertake recovery work. Alistair Speedie: We had a similar situation. This was very much a local event for us. It was the local framework teams who were working in partnership with the police, the police having taken a lead. When we got to a certain position during the response, there was a joint meeting, with the police chairing that meeting. As chair of the response working group, I have to make a judgment and be absolutely sure that the recovery stage can start. I have myself to ensure that all response issues have been addressed. The response team can step down and we go into recovery mode.

Q262 Chair: Other than yourselves, the blue-light services and the power companies, are there any other organisations that need to be involved in recovering from a situation like this?

Alistair Speedie: There are a large number of stakeholders involved. There is police, fire and rescue, and the Scottish Ambulance Service. There is the NHS and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. There is the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, Dumfries and Galloway itself and very many voluntary sector organisations that help with these issues. There are also obviously industry and transport companies involved. There is Transport Scotland and the Scottish Government. It is a large landscape of partners, and these partners all fit into a major emergency scheme.

Q263 Chair: We gather that one of the problems was that mobile phone signals were not working. Are you in touch with the mobile phone companies in an emergency like this? Alistair Speedie: Certainly, if we are having issues, we would try to sort these issues. The resilience of mobile phone masts was obviously an area that we were concerned about. That is an issue we have taken up in the recovery stage, to try and address that issue.

Q264 Chair: Have you had any response from the mobile phone companies? Alistair Speedie: At this moment in time, I can’t give you a clear indication of that, but I would be delighted to further inform you of that.

Q265 Chair: If there are any questions that you can’t answer, we are happy for you to write to us afterwards. Mrs Murray? Elma Murray: The issue in relation to mobile phones in Arran was to a degree camouflaged during the earlier part of the overall incident over a number of days. That was because the power was down for such a considerable length of time. I am not sure how familiar you are with what happened in Arran, but power was not actually restored until very late on 29 March. That was almost a week where we didn’t have mains power on the island. From 22 March through to 29 March, more and more generators were shipped on to the island. We had really quite a large number of generators on the island over that period, but what they were doing was supplying directly to lots of very small communities across the island. Part of the reason for that was a lot of power poles were down as well. It was not just a case of the damage that had taken place in Kintyre which had damaged the main lines across to Arran; it was the case that all the power cables were down on the island as well. That camouflaged to an extent the telecommunications issues that we were looking at. The telecommunications issues really started to kick in once we got most of the power issues sorted out. That became much more of an issue for us and that was just about the time we were switching over into the recovery stage. The issue for us there was not so much about notifying BT—because it was merely BT that were going to be dealing with the infrastructure issues on the island—but how BT would get notified by customers if they had a fault. The customers would have their contracts with so many different providers. That has not proved to be something we have been able to resolve at all. Q266 Chair: Did the BT phone lines in general work okay during the power cuts? Elma Murray: No. Telecommunications eventually went down and we had to switch to radio, certainly for our communication amongst the emergency services, the council and health as well. Once we had managed to get some of the roads cleared enough, we had people going out with loudhailers, literally, trying to inform communities about what we were doing and when we were hoping to get power on. Once power goes on, most people have mobile phones, which they were then able to charge and start to get a signal. Alistair Speedie: Similarly, we had intermittent issues with the BT lines and communications. We have our own radio system, which worked fine. There were issues maybe with not having enough handsets, but we are reviewing that. Generally, it was intermittent rather than over a long period.

Q267 Chair: Was there any issue about getting resources from the Scottish Government? Three areas of Scotland were affected all at once: Kintyre, Arran and the western part of Dumfries and Galloway. Did that lead to any problems with resources available to the Scottish Government? Alistair Speedie: In the case of Dumfries and Galloway, no, that was not the case. We had major issues with the A75 trunk road. We had help from the Scottish Government, Transport Scotland and their management agents. They were very helpful in providing snow blowers and assisting with snow clearance. Elma Murray: We had a very similar position in terms of what we were managing on Arran. Transport Scotland was able to come to our support and aid very quickly and provided us with additional equipment.

Q268 Chair: This snowstorm affected a small part of each of your areas. If a large part of your council area, even the whole council area, had been affected by a snowstorm of this scale, do you think you would have been able to cope? Alistair Speedie: In a major event like that, it is all about prioritising what resources you have. Things would just take a little bit longer. The major emergency scheme would kick in at a very high strategic level, as well as a tactical level. We would slowly but surely go about addressing all the issues. In a case like that, if it was just Dumfries and Galloway, we would obviously be looking for mutual aid. If it was Dumfries and Galloway and the Ayrshires, then the whole issue gets bigger and bigger. Obviously, the Scottish Government resilience team would hopefully be involved in assisting us. Elma Murray: The emergency that we experienced at the end of March did affect other parts of North Ayrshire at the same time as it was affecting Arran. Certainly, over the Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we had significant issues to deal with in the north part and the Garnock valley of North Ayrshire. We were very clear about managing our resources and our priorities around that. We did manage to clear the north part and the Garnock valley quicker as the wind fell on the Saturday. We were able to start to deploy any additional resources that we were able to spare from the north part of the area over to the island. The issue for us on the island was not so much about having enough resource. The nature of the island and the road infrastructure means it is single coastal roads going right round the island, or one or two roads going across the island. You can only deploy so much equipment at any one time anyway. Ian Carruthers: I can make a small political point. If it hit the whole of Dumfries and Galloway in the same manner, there would be a very strong political voice at that point, looking for potential further resources from both the Scottish and national Governments. Elma Murray: I have one other point. I am sure this will be true of Dumfries and Galloway as well. I was contacted by a number of other chief executives in Scotland, offering mutual support and aid. If the whole of the area of North Ayrshire rather than just the north coast and the Garnock valley had been subjected to the same very extreme severe weather as Arran was, then I would have been calling on colleagues from across west central Scotland to assist the council. To date, whenever that has happened in the west of Scotland, and certainly Scotland generally, councils have been very good at supporting each other.

Q269 Chair: Were you or the power companies able to ensure that care homes were supplied with electricity? Alistair Speedie: There were a number of care homes that were affected. They were obviously targeted as a priority. As a council, we cleared roads to enable Scottish Power to do enough work to get that electricity back on as quickly as possible. We also had our care for

9 people teams helping closely there and making sure there was enough food, drink and various bits and pieces to assist in the response. Elma Murray: The two main places that we gave quite a lot of thought to at the start were our care home and our hospital in Arran. We have a local hospital as well. Both of those facilities have their own generator, which was obviously extremely helpful, although the care home’s generator did break down. We had to deploy additional engineering resources to get that back up and running. It was down for about five or six hours, while we got that back up and running. We also moved anyone that was vulnerable either up to the hospital or to the care home, so that we knew that they would be well cared for. Going back to one of the points that Mr McGovern raised earlier on in relation to checking on vulnerable people living in their homes, we did airlift some people off of the island. When some of our partners had gone out to check on them, they identified one or two people who they felt were overly vulnerable. We managed to get support from HMS Gannet to get them airlifted off the island. Alistair Speedie: We also set up rest centres in the west of our region to deal with ferry traffic that came in late and particularly to deal with people who were stranded and various travellers across the affected area.

Q270 Mike Crockart: It would be useful to pin down what the size of the problem was and how many people were affected by it. Do you have details of the number of days without power, the number of households affected and the geographical area affected, things like that? Elma Murray: I do not have the geographical area because it was the whole of the island of Arran. In terms of the number of properties that were affected, it was 3,876 on the island. The first properties connected were 300 on the Saturday afternoon, 23 March, because there was some generator capacity on the east side of the island. We did not fully restore power to everywhere on the island until probably Friday, 30 March. We also had generators where power would go off and on. We had some areas where it was difficult to get the fuel to repower the generators. We had incidents like that over the course of the week, but it was almost a full week for some properties in Arran. It was probably about 1,500 that were still waiting to be connected until certainly the Wednesday night or Thursday morning.

Q271 Mike Crockart: In terms of the power outages, it was confined just to Arran for your council? Elma Murray: It was Arran, yes. No, sorry—I beg your pardon—we also had 100 properties affected in the north part of Largs, but that power was restored on the Saturday. Alistair Speedie: In Dumfries and Galloway, it was very much the west of the area from a size point of view. We have four previous district council areas that we talk about. They are Wigtown, Stewartry, Nithsdale, and Annandale and Eskdale. It was very much the Wigtown area and part of the Stewartry area that was affected. At its peak, we had 10,000 homes affected by outages but most of these were reconnected by Saturday, and certainly by Monday all had been connected again. Scottish Power did provide generators, which we deployed where we could, when the roads were opened. We were carrying out winter maintenance operations continually to get these roads open.

Q272 Mike Crockart: How many of the 10,000 in your case and almost 4,000 in the other were in particularly isolated rural communities?

Alistair Speedie: There are particularly isolated areas. For example, farmhouses would be particularly isolated. The communities are very small, so, yes, they are generally isolated. It is just a very rural area generally, where the communities are well spread out. Elma Murray: Members of the Committee will probably have seen some of the television coverage earlier this year, particularly in relation to Arran. If you did see any of that, you will have seen that we were talking in quite a lot instances about one or two properties just nestled down in the side of a hill somewhere on their own. That was why the power problem took so long to sort out and was so sustained. On occasions, we were literally bringing small generators in for two or three properties at a time just because all the power poles were down. There was a combined effort by SSE to install generators but also fix all the power poles, so they could then connect to bigger generators and eventually back on to the mains again. I would not be able to tell you exactly how many isolated properties there were, but it was a fair number for Arran. Ian Carruthers: Looking at some figures we have, it reduced from, in the Wigtownshire area, 6,000 being without power on the Friday to 700 on the Monday. I would imagine that the 10% or 700 that were left were in a very rural location, as a rule of thumb.

Q273 Mike Crockart: You talked a bit about the particular problems of trying to deal with the recovery phase in areas like that. The major problem seemed to be access. Were there other things you have learned from that which indicate particular problems you should think about for the future? Elma Murray: For me, the main issues were the ones I outlined earlier in terms of having our outdoor education centre in Arran in a better position to be able to support people. Quite honestly, when you look at the road structure on an island like Arran, there are always going to be issues in relation to accessibility during a severe storm like that. Being quite frank about it, the remoteness is part of the attraction for a number of people that live in Arran. Alistair Speedie: That is very true again in Dumfries and Galloway. In looking at the problems that we faced, we are trying to increase community resilience through our community resilience programme. We see that as being very important going forward. We have an officer who works on that as a single task. We have community resilience as far as winter service is concerned. We deploy, to the community councils and other community groups, footway gritters, bags of salt and all sorts of pieces of equipment, so they can help themselves in such situations to start with, before it gets serious. We also have flood resilience measures. Again in areas of high risk, we have a flood resilience scheme. With regard to generators and positioning them in key locations for an event like this, where communities can focus on it and go and get help, that is something we are looking at very clearly. The deployment of generators in specific areas, either in schools or village halls, is something that we must risk assess very clearly. It does have its advantages, but again it can have its disadvantages in who maintains these and looks after them, so that they can be brought into action if such an event was to reoccur. Community resilience is an issue in an area that we will continue to develop. We see great advantages in that.

Q274 Mike Crockart: You have previously said that this was unexpected because it was a yellow alert from the Met. Talk me through the timeline of how it moved from that initial yellow alert, which is like many other yellow alerts that you get, and when it ended up making it to the amber alert and involving yourself. How quickly did that happen? I am interested to see whether it mimics what was happening in SSE and Scottish Power. They very quickly changed through the course of the Friday, moving from what they expected to be

11 a small amount of damage to what ended up being a substantial amount of damage. How quickly did the councils change their perception of what was going to happen? Elma Murray: From our point of view in terms of the timeline, at four o’clock on the Friday morning, our road staff commenced gritting the roads on the island, based on the weather indications that they had had. By seven o’clock that morning, the snow had started on Arran. Between 7.30 and eight o’clock, we discovered that the power had failed. That was not specifically as a result of what was happening on Arran at that point, but what had been happening on Kintyre, I believe. At that point, we took some decisions around whether or not we opened the schools. We decided not to open the schools on the basis of the amount of snow that was falling. We were also starting to experience severe snowfalls in the north part of North Ayrshire as well, in the Garnock valley. By about a quarter to 10, our civil contingency unit was fully engaged. That was the emergency contingency unit from the west of Scotland. At that time, it was still the Strathclyde emergency contingency group. It had kicked in by that time. By 11.15, we were having our first tactical teleconference to manage the emergency. By that time, roads were closed and I think we had two vehicles that had gone off the system and we were not in contact with at that time because they were stranded. It moved very fast over a very small number of hours in the morning.

Q275 Mike Crockart: Did you have a similar scale of traffic light system to that outlined by Mr Speedie? Elma Murray: In terms of the colour-coded alerts, those are usually issued by the Met Office relating to the weather. As I said to the Chair, I do not receive yellow alerts. That is something that our operational staff would manage. It would only come to me if it was an amber alert. By the time any amber warnings were going out in terms of the weather, I knew we were having severe difficulties because we were managing it and the council was deploying resources. Alistair Speedie: The information we received from the Met Office on Thursday 21 March did not indicate that it would be any more than a yellow, but as that night went on and we came into the early hours of the Friday morning, we were obviously on winter service operations. By 8.30 in the morning, the council’s emergency centre was operating. We had a group of people in there just pulling things together. We issued our first situation report at 11 o’clock. Things had deteriorated so quickly by that time that 104 schools out of 118 had closed. A number of important roads were already closed and a number of areas in the Machars—the areas of Wigtown—were without power, so it did deteriorate very quickly. We had to just address that situation as it went on.

Q276 Chair: How did people get hot food when the power was down? Did the power companies provide catering vans or any means of people getting hot food? Alistair Speedie: In Dumfries and Galloway, the power company, Scottish Power, concentrated very much on contacting local hotels, restaurants and businesses that could provide food. They did that very effectively. The council itself has two mobile catering units that it deployed. We also opened up the rest centres where we have kitchen facilities. We had other kitchen facilities at care homes, etc. These were all used to address the situation. Elma Murray: Scottish and Southern Energy were dealing with the power issues for Arran. They did deploy a number of food stations across the island. The other thing we were doing was bringing in equipment and goods either from the Kintyre peninsula or from Troon by boat round to the rest of the island. We did deploy a number of food stations that were kept open throughout the whole week.

The council did not open rest centres as such. We opened respite centres on this occasion. We were strongly encouraging people to stay in their homes because of the degree of snow drift and the lack of clear roads, which we were keeping open only for emergency vehicles for a number of days. We had respite centres that people could make their way to, which were a combination of community halls and facilities that the council and other emergency services owned. The fire service opened the fire station for us, and some of the hotels provided respite as well.

Q277 Graeme Morrice: Obviously, these power outages would have had a major impact on local residents and businesses. Can you describe the particular impact that these power cuts were having on local households and businesses? Elma Murray: There were certainly a number of issues for local residents. What I saw happening in terms of local residents was a huge amount of community support and community spirit. People were literally mucking in and helping each other out as far as they could, and making sure that everybody had somebody else to contact. I have already explained the arrangements in terms of the more vulnerable people. Clearly, with the length of time it went on, the more vulnerable some people would become. With people who would not normally have been classed as vulnerable on the Friday, by the Monday or Tuesday, we would be looking at that with different eyes and with a different view. In terms of businesses, we were approaching the Easter weekend and the major business sector on Arran is tourism. There is an organisation called VisitArran, which was extremely concerned about the potential for the island to lose significant revenue potential over the Easter weekend. I think it is fair to say that there was a degree of pressure on not just the council but all of the emergency services, SSE and any of the other partners to try and get Arran as ready as possible to be able to open up for the weekend. We took an assessment on that late on the Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, based on some discussions with SSE. The major consideration for us at that point was power. We did manage to open the island for businesses and probably people were pretty pleased about that. Alistair Speedie: In Dumfries and Galloway, there is no doubt that local businesses were affected, but we dealt with the fall-out and the outcomes of that through the recovery process. In the recovery process, I have five teams who do action plans to address the recovery effort. One of these is under the heading of the economy. That particular functional manager will look at local businesses to see what issues they had, if there are any cash flow problems or if they need emergency assistance. That was done. As the Chief Executive of North Ayrshire council says, we were very keen to tell the world that Dumfries and Galloway was open for business for Easter because that was what came immediately after that. We were mostly back to normal on Tuesday 24 March. We made great efforts through our communication teams to tell the world that we were open for business and that Easter would continue in Dumfries and Galloway. We hoped the local businesses, the arts and crafts shops and all the things that go with such a rural area would benefit from the influx of visitors.

Q278 Graeme Morrice: Were you using local businesses for the provision of emergency supplies to local residents who were not able to get out and about and get access to shops, even just for basic food shopping? Alistair Speedie: Yes, very much. There was this community spirit. I spoke earlier on about community resilience. We had done a lot of work with community councils in the Wigtownshire area, encouraging them to have their own community resilience plans to address such events. That was a great advantage. They used the advice and training we had

13 provided to bring the community together and help themselves in the situation until we could get the various responders there on the scene to help them as well.

Q279 Graeme Morrice: In terms of your local authorities recording information— and you gave statistics earlier about the number of households affected by the loss of power— is there any other information that you would record? Also, do you both have an indication of the specific costs to local businesses through them losing revenue as a result of not being able to trade? Alistair Speedie: Yes. In such an event, we record lots of data. It is obviously important to record costs that the council incurs, so that we can look at the possibility of reclaiming these costs. We must obviously have clear evidence. When everybody is addressing an event, no matter whether it is a disaster such as a snow or flood event, you must clearly have a team recording the costs as we deploy and try and help the community. As a competent council, we will never say, “We are not doing that because who is going to pay.” We will pay there and then and address the issue. We will record all the details in the hope that we will be able to claim remuneration from whomever or from the appropriate responsible bodies for our expenditure.

Q280 Graeme Morrice: Do you have an indication of the loss in financial terms to local businesses, even ballpark figures? Alistair Speedie: I do not have that information today, but I could provide that through the recovery reports, if the Chair so wished.

Q281 Graeme Morrice: But you have that information? That is information that your local authority has recorded? Alistair Speedie: I would hope we would have some indication of that. Ian Carruthers: What we do have as an indicator is a claim to the development scheme for £1.71 million. That is part of that information. It is certainly not all of it, but it is part of it.

Q282 Graeme Morrice: What about North Ayrshire Council? Elma Murray: We won’t have all of that information. The reason for that is that it depends on the extent to which businesses decide there is something they need from the council. Not all businesses will have done that. Like colleagues in Dumfries and Galloway, as part of the recovery phase, we set up an economy and business group, so that there was a clear line for businesses to approach the council and get support and help. We will have the information from that economy and business group, but I don’t have it with me today. I would not be able to give you an assurance that that would cover everything that had happened to every business on the island. I am very sure that some of them will have made claims through their insurance. That is just things they have done and have not contacted us about at all. The other point that might interest to you is this. We needed our local hotels on the island for workers to stay there. We had over 100 SSE engineers on the island over that week. Although the hotels were concerned about the Easter weekend, they did quite a lot of business in the week running up to it. In fact, it was probably the busiest time for some of them just because of the number of service personnel there trying to sort things out on the island. Graeme Morrice: So every cloud— Elma Murray: Well. Graeme Morrice: You are canny people. Alistair Speedie: If I could come in on that, on the business side, there were farming issues. At that time it was the lambing season and many lambs were lost. That was certainly

14 an issue from a business perspective for the farming community. That moved on to be dealt with by the Scottish Government directly, but we did keep a very close eye on that in our recovery model.

Q283 Graeme Morrice: How co-operative did you find the power companies during this crisis? Elma Murray: Extremely co-operative. It goes back to the nature of an island community. When something like this happens, they all get their sleeves rolled up and start trying to sort it out. For example, we had a number of farmers helping to clear some of the roads where they could. The hotels stepped in particularly well. The local Co-operative shop helped us. With the power being down, there was food in their freezers that they knew they weren’t going to be able to sell, so they provided it free of charge to some of our respite centres, hotels and other areas so that it could be used. There was a great degree of co- operation.

Q284 Graeme Morrice: Do you find that is still there? Obviously, this could happen in the future—hopefully not, but you never know. Do you find the power companies co- operative throughout the year? Elma Murray: The answer to that is yes. We have had no issues with the power companies at all over the course of the year. Alistair Speedie: Similarly, yes, we had full co-operation. In normal operational circumstances, we have close contact with the power companies. They are very much part of the major emergency scheme, as stakeholders. As late as 28 June, they had a presence in the area. There was what you might call a co-debrief with community councils and local members on how the event went. Yes, there was good co-operation.

Q285 Graeme Morrice: Do you think the energy distribution network is resilient enough for any potential future occurrences? Alistair Speedie: There are certainly improvements planned in this particular area by Scottish Power. Obviously, the resilience has to take ice load, wind, snow, etc. They are certainly going to strengthen that in the future to help, hopefully.

Q286 Graeme Morrice: Are you generally satisfied then that the plans are there and investment is available to make those improvements to ensure that in the future, if there is a similar situation to what you experienced earlier this year, operations will be more resilient than it has been in the past? Alistair Speedie: The plans that have been presented to the community and the council would indicate that that will be the case in this particular area. I cannot talk about the whole of Dumfries and Galloway, but in this particular area where the event took place. Ian Carruthers: They have a clear investment strategy and that has been communicated to the local public and members of the council. I think they have been upfront and honest about that; they have certainly come across that way. Alistair Speedie: As long as the lines are overhead, there will always be the risk.

Q287 Graeme Morrice: So you think they are doing enough in terms of future planning? Ian Carruthers: Provided they come up to their promises, I would say they are. Jim McGovern: You sounded slightly doubtful there. Graeme Morrice: He is a politician.

Ian Carruthers: I have seen it in the business plans and the strategy. If I was taking it at face value, I have to accept that.

Q288 Jim McGovern: Are you confident? Ian Carruthers: I am. From the Dumfries and Galloway perspective, Scottish Power, if they say they will deliver, they deliver. Sometimes, they take a little bit longer, but on a major project like this, they are usually pretty much on time.

Q289 Graeme Morrice: Are you confident that the resources are there to allow them to deliver? Ian Carruthers: Because of the size of Scottish Power, yes, absolutely. They are a very large company. They have that ability and resource at hand. Elma Murray: There were two aspects to the power issues on Arran. One was the problems that SSE were experiencing in Kintyre in terms of the big power units that they had. On the island itself it was the power poles and the distribution network, if you like. The way in which they deployed their resources to try and resolve all of that was absolutely superb and we could not fault them in any way in relation to the support that we had over that period. People were working round the clock. There were 100 engineers on an island the size of Arran. There is very little more they could have done to resolve that.

Q290 Graeme Morrice: The biggest invasion since the Vikings, no doubt. Elma Murray: Yes, although they only went to Largs, as far as I am aware. I am not sure if they went to Arran. Certainly, our elected members and I were comfortable about the response that we got from Scottish and Southern Energy to the problems that we had on Arran. In terms of the future resilience of their network, that is an issue for them. It certainly would not have been cheap for them to do what they were doing over that period. From their perspective, I would imagine that they would be looking at more effective ways of providing greater resilience in the network.

Q291 Chair: Where the power companies required access via private roads to get to fallen poles—and in a lot of cases obviously the private landowner would not have the capacity to clear the road—were the councils able to help where private roads needed to be cleared? Elma Murray: Yes. Alistair Speedie: Yes. If it was a key piece of equipment that needed to be repaired, we certainly made that access available. In relation to private roads in general, we obviously advise the public and private landowners that they are very much their own responsibility, unless it was an emergency issue for Scottish Power or a medical issue, because of the other priorities we had to face.

Q292 Pamela Nash: In the last inquiry we had into this issue, we heard that when it happened before that Scottish and Southern Energy had paid out even more compensation that was necessary under statutory requirements. I would be interested what you think, Councillor Carruthers. What was the impact on your constituency? Was the compensation enough and what was people’s experience in claiming compensation from the power company? Ian Carruthers: The information I have is that Scottish Power’s policy is by default. They do not write and notify their customers. If they have the information that they have been out for a certain amount of time, by default, they just automatically send a cheque. As far as I am aware, it has certainly not been brought to me at a political level that there has been an issue there. My local Member did call a meeting with Scottish Power. That was Russell

Brown, a Member of the Parliament here, who attended. He is very aware of that and he was involved as well. They were pretty much satisfied and that was one of the things that came up during the discussion.

Q293 Pamela Nash: Was that the same for domestic customers and business customers? Did you have any businesses come to you? Ian Carruthers: I will be absolutely honest: I cannot answer that absolutely truthfully, but I would imagine that it would be consistent across the board. I do not know the exact detail of their policies. The information that I received was predominantly in relation to residential rather than business.

Q294 Pamela Nash: But you had no complaints? Ian Carruthers: No; at a political level, I have not received any major complaints other than what would normally come through the discussions with other members at a local level. Alistair Speedie: Very shortly after the event, Scottish Power published a claims telephone number. Through our area framework teams and other methods, we advertised that and spread that as much as possible to enable people to make claims if they felt it was appropriate.

Q295 Pamela Nash: On that wider level, did it come to your attention at all that anyone had any difficulties in receiving compensation or perhaps did not receive compensation that fully compensated them for the loss incurred? Alistair Speedie: I am not personally aware of any situation. Elma Murray: Scottish and Southern Energy were responsible in Arran. Again, they made the arrangements about how claims could be submitted pretty widely known. The council provided a bit of support on that in terms of helping people if they wanted to come into our offices to fill in claim forms. We also made sure that we had the forms available in our offices. Nothing at all has been brought to my attention in relation to anyone having any difficulty or not having a claim for compensation satisfied. I am not personally aware of any difficulties.

Q296 Jim McGovern: The question Pamela has put has covered the one I was going to ask. In terms of claimants, has putting in a claim had any impact on their premiums or the ability to get insurance? Elma Murray: Are you talking about householders or businesses?

Q297 Jim McGovern: Householders and businesses. Elma Murray: Nothing has been brought to my attention about that. People called the severe weather a one in 50 year event, so it was very unusual for it to be as extreme as that. I have had nothing said or represented to me that lets me know the answer to your question.

Q298 Jim McGovern: So there are not higher premiums in that geographical area because of what has happened in the past? Elma Murray: No. Ian Carruthers: It is like flooding. If you get flooded, sometimes you cannot even get insurance. Are you talking about household insurance?

Q299 Jim McGovern: You are right, Ian, and that is the point I am making. Does it become more difficult because of these circumstances for people in that area to get insurance and, if so, are their premiums higher? Elma Murray: I have no evidence to suggest that at all. Alistair Speedie: I have no evidence to say either/or. I am sorry; I do not have that detail. Ian Carruthers: We can ask and find out. Jim McGovern: It would be helpful if you could find out, but if you have not had any feedback, that would suggest that it has possibly not happened. It would be good for the record just to know for sure.

Q300 Chair: The next subject is communications. We have already largely covered it. Perhaps just to recap, can you tell us what methods you used to communicate with people during the crisis? Elma Murray: We used twitter, our website and radio. There was a lot on the TV for those who had power to look at that.

Q301 Chair: People in Kintyre kept on complaining to me that Arran was getting all the publicity and that they were being ignored. Elma Murray: Yes, at least everybody knows now where Arran is. We used all the modern forms of communication, but we used all the traditional forms as well. We prepared a lot of leaflets. We also used the fact that a lot of people were coming on and going off the island on the ferries. We prepared leaflets that went on the ferry as well to tell people what to expect, particularly when people were coming across on the Thursday and Friday, when we knew we were going to be doing the switchover of power from generator to mains. There were also some roads that still had pretty high banks of snow at the side of them and weren’t as passable as they might normally have been. That was just so that people had some kind of sense of what they were likely to expect on the island. We used all forms of communication. Again, that is something that we feel worked particularly well. We felt the radio communication were particularly more successful. Alistair Speedie: We were very similar. We tried every media opportunity to inform, advise and give people advice at all levels. We have our own Facebook page for winter service. We used that very effectively. In fact, we published one photograph which indicated a huge snow drift and it had something like 48,000 hits within a very short time. These are areas that we need to develop further.

Q302 Chair: But what about people who, because they didn’t have power and there were no mobile phone signals, were not able to access the internet or twitter. How did you communicate with them? Alistair Speedie: Using our networks and people on the ground, walking and contacting community councils as best we could. The community resilience we had set up beforehand very much helped that. There was an understanding in the community of what they needed to do to keep in touch and let everybody know what the situation was.

Q303 Chair: What about people trying to communicate with you? Was there a widely known phone number or point of contact that people could use? Alistair Speedie: Certainly, the council has its clear number where you can call its contact centre to get all departments and all contacts within the council. That knowledge is freely available.

Q304 Chair: Is that a number that people are aware of, if they did not have internet access to look it up? Alistair Speedie: Yes; I would suggest so. Elma Murray: We have emergency numbers as well for people to contact. During the period of the emergency, we set up a specific emergency phone-in centre as well. One of the issues that we faced during the event was that people were phoning the hospital. We had to divert people away from the hospital to release the hospital so that they could concentrate on what they needed to do. We did set up some special numbers and communicated those pretty widely through leaflets and radio signals to other parts of the island that weren’t as contactable, so that people knew who to phone if they needed information. Again, phone communication on the island was somewhat hampered because of the power problems.

Q305 Chair: Did the phones work for a certain length of time after the power went down but, because the power cut was so long, they eventually gave up? Elma Murray: Yes. The minute any generators came up, people would have their phones plugged in and start to reconnect and get more of a signal for a while, but because some of the generators were a bit intermittent, it meant that in some places the power would come on for a few hours and then go off again. People were trying to make the best of that.

Q306 Mike Crockart: Obviously, these were major events. You have talked about one in 50 year events, although we ended up having two similar types of one in however- many-year events year after year in Scotland. Did the councils have any responsibility for monitoring the condition of electricity distribution equipment in preparation for any of these types of events over the rest of the year? Alistair Speedie: From my knowledge, it does not. Elma Murray: I would agree. We don’t monitor the distribution unless we get particular complaints or issues brought to our attention. For example, if a business tells us that one of the business problems it was having was in relation to power or telecommunications, then we would look at that specifically and liaise with the power or telephone companies. Nothing has been brought to my attention in that way.

Q307 Mike Crockart: Do you actively monitor power outages? Elma Murray: We don’t monitor power outages, but every power outage of any length will be recorded and held by our civil contingencies unit. That would be logged as an incident. We will have records of any significant power outages.

Q308 Mike Crockart: What do you class as “significant”? Is it of a particular length? Elma Murray: Probably something that is going to start to cause a degree of concern for people. I am not sure what the timeframe would be for that. It would not be five or 10 minutes, for example; it would be longer than that. Alistair Speedie: We would normally record during an event like this. We would not record generally throughout the year. Obviously, in rural areas where there may be issues with outages on a regular basis, maybe because of the age of the equipment, etc., there is no doubt that the public may bring that to the attention of local members and, through them, to the attention of officers who would help in contacting the power companies to see if they could assist if the customer was not getting the reaction they deserved. We would give that support.

Q309 Mike Crockart: The point I am getting to is: are there records kept indicating potential areas where you might end up having to invoke a civil contingency because it is not

19 as resilient as it should be? The evidence is drip feeding there that it is not as strong as it should be. Alistair Speedie: No, I don’t think we have that sort of preparation. On a one-off basis, it may come through members and we would help a customer in that situation, but we would only record outages in such an event like this. Ian Carruthers: I did pick up, in the meeting that Scottish Power had with local residents and members in Wigtownshire, that they have the data you are asking for. They do have that information and that is one of the target areas for this investment. It is part of their investment strategy, as far as I am aware. They are looking at this. They are very aware and they will be targeting them first in drawing them back into the main grid.

Q310 Mike Crockart: I am sure they do have that information. As the representatives of the people who are going to be affected by it, you are the ones that are more likely to say to the power company, “Hang on a second, this is potentially going to impact us so what are you going to do about it?” But if you don’t have that information available to you, then that conversation is unlikely to happen. Elma Murray: We will have that information through our civil contingencies unit. It would not be just spikes or small drops, but if there is anything, and it is happening continually in a particular place or area, then that would be brought to my attention so that we could start to raise it with the power companies. I am not getting any information from our civil contingency unit to indicate to me that there is something there that we need to look at. On the basis that they have looked at the previous evidence you have taken in preparation for me coming today, they have not highlighted anything to me at this stage.

Q311 Mike Crockart: As far as you are aware, there are procedures certainly in place in North Ayrshire to monitor that and be able to identify if there are potential problems? Elma Murray: Yes. Q312 Mike Crockart: I would ask you to check whether that is the case in Dumfries and Galloway and perhaps get back to us. Elma Murray: I will advise you of that, yes.

Q313 Chair: I do not have any further questions. I do not know if any other member of the Committee does. I thank you for all your answers. Is there anything else that you wanted to add? Is there any preparation you have done that you want to tell us about and that we have not asked you about? If there is anything further you want to say, it is up to you. Ian Carruthers: There is only one small point. It might have come up in the conversation and it is not directly relevant to the councils, but Scottish Water, in parts of the affected areas, has pump systems rather than gravity feed in relation to public drinking water. When the power went off, people could not turn on their taps and get water. It is under the same guise as saying the council should be aware of that with these hotspots. The residents will come to us as well as Scottish Water. That is the only point I have noted. Nobody else has brought it up.

Q314 Chair: Yes; it was not brought up by other areas. It certainly did not seem to be a problem in Argyll and Bute. Is it something that you have raised with Scottish Water? Ian Carruthers: We have touched on it. I do not have the whole detail. Normally, it would have a back-up generator in circumstances like that. I don’t know why that did not kick in, but it certainly had an effect. Chair: It obviously has a serious impact. Bad enough if you are without electricity, but if you are without water as well, that is even more serious.

Q315 Graeme Morrice: I would ask a few questions on that because it is an interesting point. How was this issue addressed, particularly by Scottish Water? Did it have stand pumps on street corners from which people could get water? What happened? Ian Carruthers: I do not have the exact detail. It would normally respond by getting a generator to the area if the one there had failed. It would either get a generator, get it powered up and get the system pumped back up to pressure again, or it would go out and get bowsers there. It was freezing conditions and places were inaccessible. I am not sure what the actual response was. We are still waiting on that information coming back.

Q316 Graeme Morrice: Over what period was water not available? Ian Carruthers: It was the three days when the electricity went off. It was two or three days; something like that. It was during that timescale, but I don’t know the exact time. It was just something I picked up on.

Q317 Chair: It usually took a few days before the water went off, so when the power went off initially, the water still kept flowing. It was about four or five days before we started having problems elsewhere. It sounds as if there is a fault with Scottish Water in your area if it went off straight away. Ian Carruthers: The mains have just naturally drop pressure. Some bits have peaks and troughs. Some will get water, but the higher places are losing water first and they will naturally just get less and less. But it is still an issue. Chair: Yes, it is a serious issue.

Q318 Graeme Morrice: Was there a similar problem in Arran? Elma Murray: Yes, there was. I am checking through my notes to establish that. One of the water pumping stations did run out of power. We had to get a generator. I think we used the ferry to get it round to the other side of the island to restore the water supply. We managed to do that relatively quickly in terms of the length of the event that we had in Arran. That was, as I said, about a whole week. It was not as long as that; I think we got it round on either the Monday or Tuesday. I am trying to check my notes here to clarify that.

Q319 Jim McGovern: Chair, you will probably know better than me—you being from that area—but I am sure I recall reading that plastic flagons of bottled water were made available to the public if they did not have running water. Is that correct? Ian Carruthers: That would be the standard thing. Scottish Water has its own bottles now. Accessibility would be the issue. Chair: From recollection, I think that was in Islay. It was about the fourth day before the water went off. Scottish Water then did provide bottled water. What is unusual in the Dumfries and Galloway situation is the water going off so quickly. Certainly, the experience of other witnesses was that it took three or four days before the water went off. Jim McGovern: But nobody would be left without any access to water at all? Chair: Scottish Water did provide bottled water. There was a complaint on Islay that people were left for a short time. Thinking back—this was not this year’s event, but last year’s event on Islay—I think the water went off and Scottish Water then did provide bottled water, but there may have been a gap between the water going off and the bottled water being provided. Pamela Nash: But it is not just water to drink or cook; it is for toilets. That is not going to be helped by providing bottled water. Chair: Thank you all very much for coming. It has been a big help to our inquiry.