Emergency response exercise held in Blackpool

Emergency services from Lancashire have held major incident response training in Blackpool.

On Tuesday, police, paramedics and firefighters and 300 volunteers were involved in the exercise on Blackpool promenade.

The training was supposed to take place in 2019, but was delayed due to Brexit and Covid.

Police officers were also in the area to let people know what was going on.

The exercise was not in response to a specific threat. Chief Supt Wendy Bower, leader of the General Purposes group for the Local Resilience Forum, said: “It is important to stress that is not in response to any specific threat and the UK terrorism threat level remains at substantial which means an attack is likely.

“We regularly test our plans for responding to a major incident or large-scale emergency and this allows us to ensure we are as prepared as possible should such an incident occur.

“We take these exercises very seriously as this is as close as we can get to real life experience. They take months of planning and the support of more than 300 volunteers on this occasion, along with those working within the emergency services.

“The element of surprise for those involved is essential as it helps test their knowledge, training and experience so we can work out areas which we might need to improve. We are also testing our response to supporting victims of a major incident as we know this is critical to our plans and want to ensure every agency can test their own arrangements and learn from the experience."

Image by Tom Staziker from Pixabay