Skip to main content

Support » Community Flood Plan

Developing a Community Flood Plan is one of the best ways to be ready and react to flooding. A Community Flood Plan is not intended to be a document that is written and then filed away. It is a living document that can be easily kept up to date with the latest information and details.

The Plan can take many different forms and may be titled differently in different communities.  What is important is that the Volunteer Flood Wardens understand it and use it as a guide to their actions:

  • When to act
  • What to do (and what not to do!)
  • How to communicate
  • Where to find resources

You may also want to consider incorporating the Flood Plan into a wider Community Emergency Plan. This considers how the community may respond to a broader range of emergencies, such as storms, fire, power outage or telecommunications failure.  The Flood Plan can form a useful annex to a Community Emergency Plan by providing a higher level of detail on what the emergency services can expect from a community tackling flooding.

We have easy-to-follow plan templates available and can support your community with putting the document together.

Typically, you will find the below and more in the plans:
• Emergency Contact numbers
• Activation procedure/Trigger levels
• Actions to take before, during and after an emergency
• Maps of the key areas at risk
• Community Emergency Hub locations and details
• Information on where they may be vulnerable groups
• Logging sheet template

Once you have a first draft of your plan, CCFF will review the document and make suggested additions/changes. We will also share the plan with our Cornwall Community Resilience
Network (CCRN) partners, Cornwall Council Emergency Management and the Environment Agency, who will do the same. When complete these documents are often stored by local authorities and/or the local resilience forum on ResilienceDirect, an online platform used by the emergency services and category 1 and 2 responders. For more information see https://www.gov.uk/guidance/resilient-communications

Community Flood Plan Template

A useful template for a flood action plan is the one devised by the Environment Agency in the South West and now widely used by communities at risk of flooding in that region.

Download

Community Emergency Plan Template

A useful template updated in January 2026 by Cornwall Council Emergency Management and Cornwall Community Flood Forum (Community Emergency Plan Toolkit – Cornwall Council).

Download
« Back to Support

Contact Us

Send us a message and we will get back to you as soon as possible.