Sunday, 12 September 2010

Let’s Hope This Really Was A Waste Of Time & Money….

A spokesman for the TaxPayers’ Alliance said: “Taxpayers would question whether this exercise is good value for money.

“They want their police officers to be well trained, but this is clearly taking those officers away from their duties for an event which is unlikely ever to happen in Britain.
Hmmm, well, that’s certainly true.

But perhaps the TPA should bear in mind that earthquakes aren’t the only event that can cause building collapse, as MacHeath points out…
“At a time when the police are facing massive budget cuts they need to use the resources they have wisely.” Sergeant Colin White, a crime scene manager with Hampshire Constabulary, worked on disaster victim identification at Fort Widley, near Portsmouth.
Except as it turns out, this is not wholly a UK exercise.

Nor is it wholly UK-funded:
This week’s EU-funded project, code-named Exercise Orion, simulated emergency services rescuing people caught up in the disaster. In one “real life event”, up to 600 casualties were rescued from fictional town of “Widley”, Hants.
Let’s hope those skills don’t need to be put into practice, and we can all carry on moaning about ‘earthquake training’, eh?
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6 comments:

  1. Witterings from Witney12 September 2010 at 11:49

    It is not 'widley' known that our police have to be trained for all emergencies.

    Reverting to your preceding post - wonder if this included training on how to cross the road?

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  2. ArtCo12 September 2010 at 12:10

    A Question : And who trains the Police for these 'incidents'. Im sure a real 'investigative journalist would give his right arm ' for a good story.
    But we can only hope Julia.

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  3. JuliaM12 September 2010 at 19:15

    That's a very, very interesting question...

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  4. blueknight12 September 2010 at 22:00

    And who trains the Police for these 'incidents'.
    In the old days a couple of Officers from each Force would get trained at a central location.
    The best and most current knowledge was included and dependant on what was being taught the 'national trainers' could be from anywhere, including the Army, or HM Prisons.
    In these PC times they would probably have had some diversity training stirred in.

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  5. JuliaM13 September 2010 at 05:37

    "In these PC times they would probably have had some diversity training stirred in."

    I'd hope disaster recovery would be at least one area unaffected by such nonsense!

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  6. Macheath13 September 2010 at 08:04

    Thanks for the link and your comment - I'd overlooked the EU funding element of the exercise, being distracted by mis-reading the title as'Exercise Onion' and wondering if they needed them to generate artificial tears.

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