After the tragic events this week at Didcot my thoughts are with all of those involved.
From a professional point of view the high level of interoperability displayed by all those involved shows that initiatives such as JESIP and regular training and exercises involving all responding agencies is working. As with the recent floods there was cross border support and mobilisation of national assets to provide support to the local resources. All of this leads to one thing that all those, responding have a single overarching aim and are well trained and experinced in interagency working.
Next week sees the largest interagency exercise ever carried out in London. Exercise Unified Response will test all of the responding agencies in both live play and command post exercise. I am sure there will be huge media coverage of this exercise and further information is available via the London Fire Brigade website.
As with all exercises and real incidents there will be joint learning taking place both during the incident and during the debriefs. It is important that lessons learned are shared to the wider responding community and the JESIP iniative to ensure this happens is a brilliant ongoing piece of work nationally.
For those of you within a category 1 or 2 responder organisation do you know what your role or responsibilty would be during a major or significant incident? Have you taken part in table top, command post or live play exercise? As I have said above regular training and exercising between responders can only lead to improved responses to incidents.
