U.K. nuclear disaster exercise reveals worrisome lapses in emergency response

evasive action and collided with another truck. About 100 people are contaminated with radioactivity from the accident, seven of them suffer serious injuries, and two are killed.

The exercise was carried out in a field near HMS Gannet, a Royal Navy search and rescue base at Glasgow Prestwick airport, with co-ordination centers in East Kilbride, Glasgow, London, Bristol, and Aldermaston.

The MoD’s Defense Nuclear Safety Regulator says the most serious problem revealed by the exercise was the sheer amount of time it took MoD’s experts responsible for coordinating responses to such accidents to arrive from their base at Abbey Wood in Bristol to the police’s emergency control center in East Kilbride. From the time they were informed of the accident, it took them five and a half hours to get to the scene.

“This lack of support created major difficulties for the multi-agency response, which struggled to attain a meaningful understanding of the issues,” said the regulator’s report. The absence of MoD expertise “over such an extended and critical period was not acceptable.”

The report also pointedly noted that the Scottish Ambulance Service refused to transport two seriously injured people to a local hospital because the victims were contaminated with radioactivity. Because the ambulance crews refused to get the victims to a hospital, Royal Marines and MoD police had to use military vehicles to do so. “There were periods when the response became disorganized, and it was less than clear who was in charge at the scene,” said the regulator. Discussions with ambulance staff “resulted in considerable delay in developing a plan to manage the [contaminated] casualties.”

Additional delays in dispatching paramedics to retrieve radioactive casualties were “escalated” to incident commanders “but without adequate resolution.” A footnote added: “Another serious casualty was declared dead due to the extended delay.”

A second report dealing with Exercise Senator 2011, out together with input from all the agencies involved lists additional problems: concerns over poor mobile phone coverage, and the fact that the first written notification of the accident received by the police was by fax. The use of paper to pass on vital messages at the police’s East Kilbride control center was “not fit for purpose and exposes the force and other agencies to criticism and potential reputation damage,” the report said.

All these problems notwithstanding, MoD insisted that the exercise had successfully demonstrated its ability to cope in an emergency. “Some improvements were identified to further enhance procedures and these have since been addressed,” said a spokesman.