Council and democracy

Hertfordshire prepares for disaster training

Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service is co-ordinating the response to a catastrophic earthquake which will hit several parts of the country in September 2010, as part of a multi-agency International exercise.

Exercise Orion is co-financed by the European Union, and will test the UK’s emergency response to large scale disasters to the limits, exhausting all capacity to deal with it alone, and activating assistance from other countries through the EU civil protection mechanism. Hertfordshire were supported in the bid by Hampshire and Lincolnshire Fire Services, the Fire Service College and Technisches Hilfswerk (THW), a German emergency response organisation.

Roy Wilsher, Hertfordshire’s Chief Fire Officer said: “In recent years the number and severity of natural and manmade disasters has increased, with many instances in other countries overwhelming national response capacity, leading to requests for international assistance.

“The UK is very experienced at providing aid to other countries hit by disaster, but we’ve never had a situation where we have needed to request international assistance into the UK.

“This exercise will test every aspect of the response, from requesting assistance from the European Union Commission, the request for aid being actioned, the EU teams entering the UK and how the teams work together on the ground.

“This will be a huge challenge but there is an excellent team working on the project, each project lead is a specialist in their own field. Once the exercise is finished I hope that we will have tested our national response alongside an international response, and I’m sure that we will learn a lot of lessons, which will improve our resilience arrangements.

“The scenario is based on something that may happen once in thousand years, or may never happen, but if we were hit by a significant earthquake in the UK the impact would be huge, and if we’re prepared we can lessen the impact significantly.”

Exercise Orion will take place over four days starting on September 6, 2010. Live exercises will be held at Ford Widley in Hampshire and in Merseyside, alongside simultaneous strategic Gold command exercises in Hertfordshire, Hampshire, Lincolnshire and Merseyside.

The video above shows one of the live exercise sites, Fort Widley in Hampshire, and interviews with Hertfordshire’s Chief Fire Officer Roy Wilsher and Panos Katsikopoulos from the European Union, who are co-funding the exercise.