From fish soup to an aquarium… and back again


public transport network. Venue security, whether it is conventional or specialised, can only get us so far in protecting against acts of terrorism.


Reconstructing the aquarium So, where does this leave us? What should a proper preparedness and response effort look like?


Fix the conventional security problem Conventional security measures need to be addressed adequately and early. Training, licensing, and recruitment need to occur early enough to avoid last- minute problems. If needed, draft in reservists from the Territorial Army to ensure adequate availability of staff.


London keeps moving


Keeping Londoners and visitors moving is a valid anti-terrorism objective. The great fear that most of us have in London is that the Olympics will cause weeks of gridlock for the whole city. Large assemblies of people milling about provide excellent targets for terrorists, this is true regardless of whether the situation is created by queues for security screening or by overwhelmed transportation infrastructure.


Make good capabilities better There are good capabilities in UK and in London in particular. The London 2012 Olympics present an opportunity to put resources into the Met’s already good CBRN capability, including its Dedicated CBRN Unit. Numerous Met personnel are trained to one of four levels of CBRN proficiency. However, the climate of financial austerity is likely to have adversely affected police capacity. Training and equipping police as CBRN responders is not cheap. Whilst it is not immediately apparent that capability has decreased, it almost certainly has not increased. It is time to give up on this business as usual approach. A large incident will overwhelm the existing capacity, so let’s train more police officers.


The same applies to HART. HART represents valuable capability to actually rescue victims and perform emergency care in the hot zone, rather than waiting for victims to wander out, or an entry team to drag bodies out of the incident site. Helping the people who need help


but can’t get to it is one of the great capability gaps in incident response. HART is one of the more useful and interesting attempts to bridge this gap. It should be strengthened and encouraged.


Let’s not destroy capability, at least not until after the games


Even if the government is hell-bent on getting rid of the Joint CBRN Regiment, let’s push this back 10-12 months and let the army leave the specialised CBRN business on a high note rather than a whimper in the bleak midwinter. In fact, let’s put a lot more RAF guys into the effort as part of the transition to an RAF wing, rather than leaving a sparse army cadre to effect a poor transition. Indeed, this may even give the MoD time to reconsider whether the British army should be one of the only Nato armies without CBRN troops. This is not the time to send more than 300 CBRN- trained soldiers back to general duties.


Scrap the metal: trade in Gold, Silver and Bronze for ICS


Followers of CBRN response in the UK will be familiar with the gold-silver- bronze command structure, but it does not have widespread usage beyond Britain. My concern is that gold-silver- bronze is simply not as robust and as flexible as the more commonplace incident command system (ICS) model, particularly for CBRN and HAZMAT response. Gold-silver-bronze was invented by the police services in the 1980s for police incidents, and its implementation, even in police-only incidents, has resulted in mixed opinions on its effectiveness. I would direct readers to various publicly available after-action analyses of the 7/7 bombings, the Carlos Menezes shooting, and the Buncefield fire (all in 2005) to see some interesting commentary on the gold-silver-bronze system. It is not that gold-silver-bronze is a failure, but the question is whether or not the UK can do better.


The NHS mess


Finding more surge capacity in London’s medical structure is a difficult nut to crack. Getting more field capability on to the streets and into venues is conceptually easy, if expensive. Ambulances and paramedics can be


drafted in from across the country. There is ample scope for tapping into various volunteer organisations and military medical units, both active duty and reserve. Has anyone thought of getting the volunteers up to speed on CBRN? Generating extra capacity for hospital- level care is the difficult bottleneck. Greater London does not have the comparative luxury of veterans’ hospitals and nearby military medical facilities that are available to emergency planners in major American cities. The UK military has very limited domestic hospital capability, and none in London.


Assessment teams


My final suggestion is to train and field a number of small, multidisciplinary assessment teams. [Didn’t the UK use to have MAIATs? Until they were scrapped because the children didn’t play well together? Ed.] Major events provide an ideal climate for hundreds of intermediate scenarios, incidents that might have some CBRN aspect to them. With scarce and expensive response assets, you do not necessarily want them to get bogged down in situations where they are not really needed. Does the nation’s full CBRN capacity roll out to a powder incident in Wimbledon while the opening ceremony is underway miles away? The US practice at major events is to use small Joint Hazard Assessment Teams (JHATs) to allow the incident command structure to assess intermediate scenarios. I would suggest that a fire service hazmat specialist, a military CBRN specialist, a police officer (possibly one of many counterterrorism detectives already CBRN trained) and a medic, all working together, would make a good London JHAT.


Conclusion


I’m not sure whether there is much that can be done at this late date, except argue over seasonings for the proverbial fish soup. But we can look at how the soup was cooked and see if we can avoid making the same mistakes again. After all, London will always be with us and will always be a target, with or without the Olympics. The problems outlined above will be with us long after the last medal is handed out. London needs to either be lucky or build a new aquarium.


CBRNe South America 2012, 13-14 March, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. More information on www.icbrnevents.com 30 CBRNe WORLD February 2012 www.cbrneworld.com


CBRNeWORLD


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