SPECIAL REPORT | INCIDENT RESPONSE PLANNING Mutual aid works How do you plan for the unlikely? In the event of an incident during the
transport of radiological materials, users in Great Britain can rely on their peers to provide expert on-site support quickly.
Transport packaging for radiological material meets extremely strict regulations but in the unlikely event of an incident experts are needed to offer advice quickly. Source: Bryn Colton/ Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
TRANSPORT PACKAGING FOR radiological material meets extremely strict regulations. Videos that demonstrate a train or even an aircraft crashing into various types of package and leaving them unscathed have provided dramatic evidence of how robust they are. But while radiological materials in transit are well protected, there is still an important role for the material’s owners to ensure that if there is a transport event all the stakeholders - emergency services, local authorities etc – have information as soon as possible about the materials and precautionary measures to be taken. Given the passive safety of the packaging, the option
of providing regular health physicist escorts for what may be hundreds of shipments each year between various companies and organisations across the country would be out of scale. It would add unnecessary costs to the shipment. It would even incur a small additional risk
32 | July 2026 |
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for the personnel, given that any type of travel has its own risk, albeit the type of risk we all take every day. How best should organisations prepare for the unlikely event of an event during the journey, such as a road traffic accident. There has to be a plan to manage that risk: emergency services need information about the radiological materials and it is imperative that a qualified person reaches the site as soon as possible and can take necessary actions such as setting out exclusion zones and providing advice to other responders. If that specialist is directly employed by the consigner (which has responsibility for the consignment until it reaches its destination) they may have a long distance to travel to the event site. Even in the relatively small area of Great Britain, the responsible organisation may be several hundreds of miles or kilometres away, leaving a gap of several hours before an expert can arrive at site.
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