M/ETHANE
A major incident is defined as
An event or situation with a range of serious consequences which requires special arrangements to be implemented by one or more emergency responder agency.11
M/ETHANE is the recognised common model for passing major incident information between services and their control rooms. For incidents falling below the major incident threshold ETHANE can be used, however there should be joint decision making with intermittent consideration of whether a developing incident surpasses that threshold.12
The first resources from each responder agency should send a M/ETHANE report as soon as possible to establish situational awareness. Information gathered from multiple messages will build to support shared awareness across all agencies.
We have already seen an example M/ETHANE message shared in the radio communication example earlier on in the module. The format for this message is:
