Pic gallery: Emergency services “gunman exercise” a success

Tuesday 28 April 2015

The emergency services say that a four-hour exercise involving 130 people to test responses to a scenario involving a gunman running amok in Jersey was a major success.

Paul Smith, an acting-Inspector for the States of Jersey Police, said that the exercise involving police, coastguard, firefighters, ambulance crews and the honorary police had gone “particularly well”.

The scenario was set up to test communication systems, and see how well the services worked together. The drill was designed around a shooter on the loose, moving from location to location. The services had to cope with the aftermath, and track down the gunman.

Acting-Inspector Smith said: “All of our emergency services have been involved, working particularly hard under stressful conditions, and really stretched to their limits under a difficult and challenging process.

“If you do not test, you do not learn.

“We have learned an awful lot about how we communicate and how we assess risk and about the capability of each others’ agencies – quite often they might have skills that we did not realise they had.

“We did a month of planning, there was a lot of close work with the other agencies so we that we knew exactly what we all wanted to achieve.”