The Rugby Cement plant have recently played host to both the Warwickshire Fire Service and the British Transport Police for various training exercises, all helping to build excellent relationships with our local and national emergency services teams.
On 15th and 16th June the British Transport Police (BTP) spent two days at the Cement plant, with their national team, conducting training exercises around forensics recovery and protester removal (at height). For the BTP, this was a fantastic opportunity for the team to practice together, in a real-life scenario, in a real-life environment.
Day 1’s forensic recovery training exercise involved a dummy being placed on the unused conveyor behind the ClimaFuel building. The whole area was isolated for the training exercise with the site location chosen specifically due to it being unused and offering excellent structures for the team to practice setting up a rope/pully system. This meant the team did not need to wear Cemex PPE as they needed to wear their own PPE to ensure the exercise was a real as possible.
Once the ropes were in place they lowered a Scene of Crime Officer down to the dummy whose role was then to photograph the scene, gather evidence and aid with the removal of the dummy – in this case via a stretcher via the rope’s pully.
The BTP were briefly joined by a team from Warwickshire Fire Service who were keen to see what the BTP police were doing, and to make some valuable contacts at the same time. A win win all round! In the afternoon, the team switched to protester recovery, whereby they practised removing a person who had attached themselves to the underside of a walkway.
Day 2 again involved a protester recovery training exercise, this time using a cement tanker very kindly donated by Dowse Haulage for the exercise. The team were again using an isolated area of the plant and practised the exercise of removing a ‘fake’ protester who had attached themselves to the top of the tanker. Using a unique system of ropes attached to the tanker, the police were able to recover the protester while remaining safely attached to the tanker at all times – an amazing operation!!
Mary-Ann Macinnes Collins, Regional Health and Safety Manager, who was overseeing the two day event, said: “For Cemex, this is a fantastic opportunity to make some really valuable contacts with our local and national emergency services. If in the event of a real incident, those connections will be incredibly useful. In return, we know how valuable it is for our emergency services to have real-life training opportunities and we look forward to working with them again in the future.”
You can see lots of fascinating photos and some videos from the training exercises here.
Look out in next week’s UK News to find out what happened the day Warwickshire Fire Service visited the cement plant to film their quarry water safety video!