Testing the unthinkable
In September 2010, Hertfordshire Fire & Rescue Service coordinated and ran the largest live civil protection exercise to take place in the United Kingdom (UK)
Exercise Orion was a full scale realistic unrehearsed exercise co-financed by a contribution of e953,900 from the EU Civil Protection Financial Instrument. It was designed to test the EU Civil Protection Mechanism and provide an opportunity for incoming international assistance teams to work alongside the host nation, in this case the UK. In order to provide the necessary conditions for the activation of the Mechanism a major emergency involving widespread loss of life and damage from an earthquake was used as the exercise scenario.
Although the lead organisation was Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service (FRS), Lincolnshire FRS, Hampshire FRS, the Fire Service College (UK), and German Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW) played a key role in the design and planning. The project also involved many other agencies and key government departments in England.
There were three parts to Exercise Orion:
• The Live Exercise in Hampshire involving national and internaitonal teams.
• The National Exercise Control at the Fire Service College; and
• The VIP programme.
Exercise Orion also provided an opportunity for the affected areas to receive, command, and work alongside emergency response teams from other Participating States for the first time. The exercise site at Fort Widley, in Hampshire provided scenarios to challenge the incoming national and international teams. Utilising the extensive underground chambers and other structures, the organisers constructed a range of realistic collapses and other incidents. These were designed to test the full range of USAR skills and techniques as well as presenting commanders with the challenge of co-ordinating the national and international response. All scenarios could be completely reset to allow for consistent and repeatable training outcomes. There was also a complimentary Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) exercise in Merseyside FRS involving 8 UK and 2 International USAR teams.
In addition to the two Gold commands established in Merseyside and Hampshire, two strategic level (Gold) command post exercises also took place in Hertfordshire and Lincolnshire. In total, 28 (of the 50) Fire and Rescue Services in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and 13 of the 19 medium UK USAR teams participated in this exercise.
The national exercise also fully tested for the first time, the English Fire and Rescue Services National Co-ordination Advisory Framework (NCAF). The Ambulance Service Hazardous Area Response Teams (HART), Police Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) and the Environment Agency were also involved in the live exercises. The international teams who attended Exercise Orion came from, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Norway, United Arab Emirates, Czech Republic and the USA. At the peak of operations there were almost 3,000 staff and players involved across the UK.
The National Exercise Control, situated at the Fire Service College in Gloucestershire, dealt with the interfaces between local exercises and Gold Commanders (strategic), and between Gold Commanders and government level players. The real time events from the two live exercises were used, alongside paper injects, to generate information for the command post and government players who were presented with a total of 49 simultaneous major incidents with over 2,000 fatalities and 8,000 casualties across England.
The VIP programme was designed to encourage a common understanding of current civil protection cooperation and to facilitate learning. The programme began with a visit to the field exercise site at Fort Widley in Hampshire and concluded with a London based civil protection conference and evening dinner at the House of Lords.
Exercise Orion was not designed to be a show case. To justify the investment, both financial and in time, detailed objectivesand rigorous evaluation was considered an essential feature of the exercise planning.
The evaluation covered the Reception and Departure Centres (RDC); convoy procedures; Field Exercise in Hampshire; and the integration into affected area organisational structures of both the EU Civil Protection Team and the incoming international teams.
A number of important training needs were identified, mostly concerned with raising awareness of the Mechanism. At the strategic level the exercise raised questions about the Mechanism’s structures and the sending/reception of international aid to a State that is generally well resourced with its political and social infrastructure still intact. The conception and planning of Exercise Orion started over two years before the live exercise, when the issue of the reception and management of international aid was not widely recognised in England.
The realism of Exercise Orion has added weight to the debate and provided policy makers with objective and timely evidence captured in the EU evaluation process adopted by the Exercise Orion team. Shortly after Exercise Orion, an EU Presidency Seminar on Host Nation Support was convened in Florival, Belgium (15-17th September 2010) to discuss the very issues that Exercise Orion tested. The
same issues were subsequently prioritised by the Justice and Home Affairs Council Meeting in Brussels on 2-3rd December 2010 which called for the development of guidelines on Host Nation Support, one of the major recommendations of the Exercise Orion report.
