The UK police forces are planning a major exercise of the Casualty Bureaux.
Police force Casualty Bureaux are call centres established quickly following a major Disaster to collect details of injured and dead citizens, and to collate and identify these to investigators, relatives or other concerned parties.
West Midlands Police has been given the responsibility to create, manage and report on a National Casualty Bureau Exercise. This brief originates from the various recommendations arising from the London 7/7 bombings.
The date for the exercise will be Tuesday 13th November and is likely to be between 0800 and 2000hrs.
The brief is to create three paper-feed disaster scenarios that would cause a total of at least 600 fatalities, together with a large number of other casualties. The scenarios will be fed into Police forces at various points during the exercise, in order that the loading of the Casualty Bureau telephone and software network can be increased.
The main requirement of the brief is the delivery of a high volume of calls into the Casualty Bureaux. The majority of these calls will be by telephone from pre-prepared scripts and range from the concerned relatives reporting missing persons through to general enquiries, media calls and the inevitable odd nuisance call
In order to deliver this exercise we need people to make orchestrated sequences of telephone calls in to the Casualty Bureaux system West Midlands Police are now actively seeking volunteers, or more importantly organisation that are prepared to assist in making these calls. Each caller will be provided with scripts and each call will take around 6 minutes
If your organisation is able to help with any number of calls, please contact Chris Green at chrisgreen@hbosplc.com or the BCI Secretariat at bci@thebci.org by 7th September 2007.