On Tuesday 8 October, the emergency services and other responders took part in a live major incident exercise to test procedures at the harbour, and how agencies work together in a crisis. It gave those involved the opportunity to practise in a safe and secure environment, to learn lessons and continually improve the way they work together to save lives and reduce harm in response to incidents.
The exercise involved testing the emergency response when establishing a Survivor Reception Centre.
Exercise Director and Deputy Emergency Planning Officer, Richard Blake said: “The Government of Jersey Emergency Planning Team and the Jersey Resilience Forum take training, exercising and learning very seriously.
“The approach is risk based, where we analyse risks that are serious enough to meet the definition of a major incident or emergency, and then focus our planning, and training and exercising on those that are considered to be the most serious.
“Yesterday we brought together the emergency services, Jersey Customs and Immigration Service, Government departments and others to focus on our capabilities in response to an incident at the harbour. The benefit of such an exercise allows us to check test our plans but also to make sure that our generic major incident response arrangements can adapt to any crisis response.
“I’d like to thank all our emergency services, and resilience partners in the Jersey Resilience Forum for their ongoing support and dedication. Their degree of commitment, dedication and professionalism to emergency preparedness should be extremely reassuring for the public.
“We would also like to thank those that we drafted in to perform as actors. Without their assistance we would not have been able to successfully operate this exercise.” Among the actors were a contingent from Highlands College’s Uniformed Services course. This experience will form part of their education this term, and provided insight into some of the roles they may consider as a career in later life.