The major planning room was set out with five tables dedicated to the major teams that would be coordinating things in an emergency, Emergency Services (police, fire, ambulance etc.), Technical Team (road engineers, bridge engineers to quote only two), Welfare Team (if people have to be evacuated from their homes for any reason social workers have to organise where they should go and arrange for transport, food, blankets etc.), the Environmental Team (e.g. what are the river levels at different points on all Borders rivers and how fast they are rising or falling - these are automatically recorded at the sites and the readings monitored on a large board on the planning room wall), and lastly the Media and Public Relations Team who would be responsible for keeping the public informed of what the emergency was, what was being done about it and how this action was progressing.

Mr. Hogarth asked the rhetorical question "Surely the Borders is a very safe place to live, not like Manchester, Birmingham or London? Is all this emergency planning really necessary? Could the money be better spent on other things?". He said that when he retired from the police force five years ago he took this planning job expecting it to be much less pressurised and stressful. How wrong he was! His predecessor had retired three weeks before he arrived so there was no hand over period. He started at 08.00.Hr on his first day and had just discovered where to hang his coat and which was his desk when the phone rang. It was the coast guard saying that there was a large oil slick heading for St. Abb's Head and he had better put the emergency procedure into action - and hung up! Panic! What emergency action? Luckily there was, and still is, a large bookcase of files on his office wall marked with the procedure for dealing with perhaps a hundred types of emergency and there was one on oil slicks. Saved! All was well. Other types of emergency with which Mr. Hogarth has had to deal include major flooding like that in 2001 following the worst weather in 40 years and the floods of October 2003 when the water was so high at Eyemouth that it just poured over the top of the sluice gates. Then there was the very major problem of how to deal with the Foot and Mouth epidemic. Another big problem was when ice formed in the electricity pylons to such an extent that the weight buckled them and cut the cables. Within a short time Scottish Power had 1000 generators working all over the Borders whilst they put up new much stronger pylons. There was a coach crash up the Yarrow Valley involving 50 German school children and there was the fuel crisis of 2000.

Other things that have to be planned for though hopefully they will never happen include damage to the ethylene pipeline which crosses the Borders in a 12" tube at 100 Ib per sq.in., crashes of tactical low flying aircraft, rail crashes of 125 mph trains on the east coast line, an oil tanker being wrecked off our 34 km. of coast, or having our water supplies polluted. Mr. Hogarth had to liase with 32 bodies including the military, mountain rescue, Red Cross, Transco and the State Veterinary Service as well as those already mentioned. As Eisenhower said about D-Day "Plans are nothing. Planning is everything" and this is just what this unit does.