French Red Plan

The French red plan (plan rouge) is a French emergency plan used if an emergency has a significant number of casualties in a limited area. Its aim is to organize the rescue resources to cope with the concentrated casualties.

It is different from the French white plan (plan blanc), which is designed to face a sudden and unpredicted rise of the activity of a hospital. It also differs from the Orsec plan (plan Orsec), which is designed to face insufficient emergency resources. In a red plan, the emergency resources are sufficient. The difficulty is coordinating them.

The white plan is often launched along with the red plan in order to face the massive arrival of casualties evacuated by the red plan.

The red plan is based on four concepts:

• The resources should be rationally organized: The resources should not hamper each other, or deplete resources needed by another emergency. This implies coordination of the different forces (firefighters, samu/emergency medical service, police), and assignment of roles (hierarchical sorting);
• There should be two chains of rescue, one focused on managing the site, the other focused on caring for the casualties;
• A field hospital (or advanced medical post) should be installed next to the casualties, to perform triage and stabilisation before the evacuation;
• There should be two commands, one on-site that deals with the management of the rescue operations, the other in a remote site (usually the préfecture) that deals with the reinforcement, the logistics... etc.