MORE than 20 organisations have joined forces in Dorset to orchestrate the smooth running of the sailing competition and associated events for the London 2012 Games.

The Weymouth and Portland 2012 Operations Group involves a series of working groups in the county, which have the responsibilities of transport, visitors, culture, health and safety, communications, safety and security and volunteering.

Key contacts for each of the groups will be bringing insight to their activities through a weekly column in the Dorset Echo.

Here Janet Moore, senior environmental health officer at Weymouth and Portland Borough Council and chairman of the Dorset Safety Action Group 2012, provides an insight into some of the health and safety issues under consideration for London 2012: HOW exciting – the Olympic sailing event and all the associated festivals and parties will be with us in the summer of 2012!

That was our first thought. This was quickly tempered by a reality check that, although LOCOG is the event organiser for the Games, there are a lot of public safety issues we need to start thinking about outside of the LOCOG arena and at a scale we haven’t experienced before.

So where did we start? We brought together all the local regulators who have responsibility for aspects of community and public safety and the Safety Action Group 2012 (SAG2012).

SAG2012 is made up of officers who work in health and safety, food safety, infectious disease and pest control, licensing, rogue trading, and illegal advertisers, fire, police, ambulance and coastguard services, pollution and nuisance issues, antisocial behaviour and street scene.

Our aim is to ensure tourists, workers and of course local residents are protected through the application of appropriate legislation and partnership protocols.

We had our first meeting in early 2010 when, in truth, we had very little event information to go on.

Now, however, the detail is flowing in – things like what structures will be at the various sites and how these will be organised, how and who will manage and be responsible for various roles.

Our main focus will be the beach, town centre and all the associated cultural events or the spontaneous activities that we are expecting to crop up.

Quite a lot of our work will be looking at plans from the local event organisers to make sure public safety issues have been addressed, such as the logistics of providing food services to cater for the additional visitors.

It will probably mean that new mobile and temporary food vendors will try to set up.

There is of course a route that they can apply through and be vetted pre-Games – however, we need to have in place an effective and co-ordinated plan to seize or detain anything that may pose a risk to public health or be able to remove or move any trader who is trading illegally.

Then we need to have plans on how to deal with things like noise issues, litter, unauthorised camping, pests, sewage or drainage problems, crowd safety etc.

So the idea is to train up a team of cross-agency investigators who will be patrolling during the Games.

Finally we hope that not only do the games go off safely and everyone has a wonderful experience but we want to learn from this opportunity.