The Details
Borrowed from The Evening Standard newspaper
A building has “collapsed” into an underground station as part of the biggest disaster training exercise ever seen in Europe.
The four-day Exercise Unified Response is simulating a high-rise tower block under renovation falling into Waterloo underground station to prepare emergency crews for a large-scale operation with mass casualties.
It is designed to test the contingency planning of more than 70 organisations, including police, London Ambulance Service, councils, mortuaries and the Government’s Cobra committee.
The drill is being staged at a disused Power Station, near Dartford, and includes 100 firefighters, 15 fire engines and 1,000 actors playing casualties amid upturned tube trains and thousands of tons of rubble.
A mock-up Tube station has been created and seven carriages upturned in the rubble, with 600 “injured” today being led out of tunnels to safety.
Police disaster victim identification teams will work with urban search and rescue teams, pathologists and forensic dentists.
The £770,000 drill is funded by European Union money and there will also be officers from Interpol and police from EU countries including France and Germany.
A temporary mortuary has been built at the power station.
Chief Constable Debbie Simpson, of the National Police Chiefs, said: “It’s not often we get to test working practices on such a scale and it’s really positive to see so many of our European colleagues involved.
"Effective evaluation and debriefing will help highlight good practice and any areas for development.”
In an interview with the Standard earlier this month, London Fire Brigade commissioner Ron Dobson described tube tunnels as “the worst place possible” for rescuing people as moving trains and live wires added to the danger in cramped, dark tunnels.
Mr Dobson said of today’s exercise: “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, we couldn’t just go in and drag people out in the way we might do if it was a burning building.
“In something like 7/7 you have to take them from the Tube train, along the lines and out the platforms.”
Mr Dobson said new techniques means firefighters would be able to get to the bombed trains faster than 11 years ago.
The Explore
Having seen this on the national news, my ears pricked up when I heard it was in an abandoned Power Station in Kent. Hmmm I thought, I wouldn’t mind checking out the Power Station. I saw a few articles online about the “train crash” and then promptly forgot all about it, these things happen. Well fast forward a few days to Mother’s Day and I’m sat around my mums with my sister and her bloke and he starts rabbiting on about a job he had been doing, He had delivered some heaters to a place an inside was a fake train crash that the London fire brigade were using for training.
Well that got my attention….
He then went on to tell we where it was and even show me on Google earth exactly what building he went too. During this I was already on the WhatsApp to @slayaaaa with something along the lines of “fuck we have got to do this”
So armed with the information the “bro-in-law” had given us we headed into darkest Kent and made our way to the power station. The original plan was to hit this quickly, hit the PowerStation again and he home for midnight. Well that didn’t go to plan and we ended up only doing this.
After making our way over, under and through various fences, gates, pipework etc. we sat hidden for a while checking out the lay of the land and watching windows and doors for any sign of life. We sat and waited it out whilst scoping a route in using a combination of what we could see with our eyes and the help of good ole google maps. When the time was right we made our way in. It took us a combination of stairs, dark corridors, dead ends, windows, doors, ladders, gantries and roof tops but we were finally looking through a door and down onto “our” train wreck.
The first thing to come out of both of our mouths was Fuck!!! Nothing had prepared us for the sheer scale and size of this, you don’t realise how big a train carriage is, let alone half a dozen of them thrown about willy nilly along with a load of rubble and twisted metal work.
The whole set up was pretty impressive, from the actual crash site to the replica of the walkways at waterloo station.
I’m glad we did it and glad we took the chance, it was ace.
Enjoy the pics and if you get a chance, check it out before it’s gone…..
Borrowed from The Evening Standard newspaper
A building has “collapsed” into an underground station as part of the biggest disaster training exercise ever seen in Europe.
The four-day Exercise Unified Response is simulating a high-rise tower block under renovation falling into Waterloo underground station to prepare emergency crews for a large-scale operation with mass casualties.
It is designed to test the contingency planning of more than 70 organisations, including police, London Ambulance Service, councils, mortuaries and the Government’s Cobra committee.
The drill is being staged at a disused Power Station, near Dartford, and includes 100 firefighters, 15 fire engines and 1,000 actors playing casualties amid upturned tube trains and thousands of tons of rubble.
A mock-up Tube station has been created and seven carriages upturned in the rubble, with 600 “injured” today being led out of tunnels to safety.
Police disaster victim identification teams will work with urban search and rescue teams, pathologists and forensic dentists.
The £770,000 drill is funded by European Union money and there will also be officers from Interpol and police from EU countries including France and Germany.
A temporary mortuary has been built at the power station.
Chief Constable Debbie Simpson, of the National Police Chiefs, said: “It’s not often we get to test working practices on such a scale and it’s really positive to see so many of our European colleagues involved.
"Effective evaluation and debriefing will help highlight good practice and any areas for development.”
In an interview with the Standard earlier this month, London Fire Brigade commissioner Ron Dobson described tube tunnels as “the worst place possible” for rescuing people as moving trains and live wires added to the danger in cramped, dark tunnels.
Mr Dobson said of today’s exercise: “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, we couldn’t just go in and drag people out in the way we might do if it was a burning building.
“In something like 7/7 you have to take them from the Tube train, along the lines and out the platforms.”
Mr Dobson said new techniques means firefighters would be able to get to the bombed trains faster than 11 years ago.
The Explore
Having seen this on the national news, my ears pricked up when I heard it was in an abandoned Power Station in Kent. Hmmm I thought, I wouldn’t mind checking out the Power Station. I saw a few articles online about the “train crash” and then promptly forgot all about it, these things happen. Well fast forward a few days to Mother’s Day and I’m sat around my mums with my sister and her bloke and he starts rabbiting on about a job he had been doing, He had delivered some heaters to a place an inside was a fake train crash that the London fire brigade were using for training.
Well that got my attention….
He then went on to tell we where it was and even show me on Google earth exactly what building he went too. During this I was already on the WhatsApp to @slayaaaa with something along the lines of “fuck we have got to do this”
So armed with the information the “bro-in-law” had given us we headed into darkest Kent and made our way to the power station. The original plan was to hit this quickly, hit the PowerStation again and he home for midnight. Well that didn’t go to plan and we ended up only doing this.
After making our way over, under and through various fences, gates, pipework etc. we sat hidden for a while checking out the lay of the land and watching windows and doors for any sign of life. We sat and waited it out whilst scoping a route in using a combination of what we could see with our eyes and the help of good ole google maps. When the time was right we made our way in. It took us a combination of stairs, dark corridors, dead ends, windows, doors, ladders, gantries and roof tops but we were finally looking through a door and down onto “our” train wreck.
The first thing to come out of both of our mouths was Fuck!!! Nothing had prepared us for the sheer scale and size of this, you don’t realise how big a train carriage is, let alone half a dozen of them thrown about willy nilly along with a load of rubble and twisted metal work.
The whole set up was pretty impressive, from the actual crash site to the replica of the walkways at waterloo station.
I’m glad we did it and glad we took the chance, it was ace.
Enjoy the pics and if you get a chance, check it out before it’s gone…..
