Emergency services across London are making final preparations for Europe’s biggest disaster drill.
Exercise Unified Response will simulate a tower block collapsing into Waterloo Underground station packed with passengers, London Fire Brigade’s commissioner Ron Dobson said.
The four-day exercise, starting on February 29, aims to test the contingency planning of more than 70 organisations, from mortuaries to the Government’s Cobra committee.
It will be staged at Littlebrook power station, near Dartford Crossing, and include 2,000 volunteers playing casualties amid upturned Tube trains and thousands of tons of rubble.
Mr Dobson said the techniques being tested could also be used in a terror incident. Following the Paris suicide bombings and gun attacks in November, which killed 130, London firefighters wearing bulletproof vests have been trained to work alongside police while gunmen are still at large.
The €1 million (£770,000) drill is funded by the European Union and will include specialists from Hungary, Italy and Cyprus. Mr Dobson said it would test if they could get to trapped survivors faster than the July 7 terror attacks in 2005, and help “reduce their trauma”.
He described Tube tunnels as “the worst place possible” for rescues, with moving trains and live wires adding to the danger. Speaking at the Brigade’s HQ, Mr Dobson added: “We needed to create a realistic scenario, there’s hundreds of thousands of tons of rubble.
“The idea is there’s been the collapse of a high-rise building above Waterloo station that’s gone down into the station itself (and) caused some collapse in the tunnels, there are some Underground trains caught up in it and people trapped. There’s lot of other hazards down there we need to be careful of. In something like 7/7 you have to take them from the Tube train, along the lines and out the platforms.
“One of the things we were criticised for on 7/7 was confusion between emergency services. It took us too long to agree there wasn’t a chemical involved. That wouldn’t happen in future.”
Speaking about techniques learned since the Paris attacks, the commissioner added: “We need to be able to get to the people who are rescuable and their lives can be saved before the terrorists have moved on.”@_MarkBlunden
