Drama as services prepare for air disaster

From the Amesbury Journal, first published Thursday 16th Oct 2003.

TRAGEDY shattered the peace of an ordinary sunny Sunday, when an air disaster of Lockerbie proportions rained deadly debris on to a sleepy Wiltshire village.

A 747 cargo plane collided in mid-air with a passenger airline and crashed to the ground in Purton, landing in and around a gas bottling plant loaded with hundreds of canisters of explosive gas.

Some 600 members of the emergency services descended on the scene, swarming all over the disaster site and treating the wounded in hastily assembled medical tents.

And the verdict on the day? It went like a dream.

That is because, in spite of the helicopters, sirens, flashing lights, safety cordons and plumes of smoke, it was all make-believe - a massive trompe l'oeil designed to give police, fire and ambulance crews from across the county a chance to test their mettle and experience just some of the utter chaos of a genuine catastrophe.

Complicit in the set-up was everyone from Wiltshire county council to troops from Bulford, Salisbury district hospital and the WRVS.

The Purton air disaster - codenamed Operation Wyvern Reunited - was 18 months in the planning, the largest training exercise of its kind in the county for seven years.

Chains of command came under close scrutiny during the seven-hour exercise.

An operations centre was set up at the village hall and officers on the ground were allowed to discover and deal with aspects of the disaster as they went along - just as in a real emergency.

Volunteers from the stricken village were transported to an evacuation centre and hale and hearty members of CasSim - a group dedicated to providing fake casualties for training purposes - were made up with pretend blood and burns to provide a realistic challenge for ambulance crews.

There were even pseudo-journalists on hand, whose role was to keep frontline officers on their toes by being as realistically unpredictable as possible.

Inspector Charles Dibble, of Wiltshire police, said that the exercise had gone according to plan and personnel on the ground had worked well together.

He said the next two weeks would be spent preparing a thorough debrief, ironing out some communication glitches and learning practical lessons on how to cope with the real thing.

County emergency planning officer John Edwards said the county council would also take its time evaluating Operation Wyvern Reunited but initial impressions were that it went well and would make all the difference to Wiltshire's response in the event of a genuine disaster.

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