Tower 'collapses into Tube station' during Europe's biggest disaster training drill

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Mark Blunden @_MarkBlunden29 February 2016

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 Littlebrook 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.

Disaster exercise: the event is being held at Littlebrook power station
Jeremy Selwyn

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.

In recent years specially trained teams from around the UK have been deployed to assist in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in July 2014 and the Shoreham Air Crash in August last year.

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