Specialist police teams support Europe’s biggest ever disaster training exercise

Exercise Unified Response, part funded by the European Commission Exercise Programme and coordinated by the London Fire Brigade on behalf of the London Resilience Partnership, will see the blue light services working side-by-side with 70+ partner agencies including local councils, utility companies and specialist search and rescue teams to respond to a staged scenario of a building collapsing onto an underground station.

Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) teams from all UK police regions will be working alongside other forensic specialists who contribute to the UK DVI capability, including odontologists (dentists), pathologists and radiographers.

With the support of INTERPOL, further assistance is being provided by DVI colleagues from Denmark, Germany , the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Italy and Spain.

In total 250+ DVI personnel will be working at the scene and in a specially constructed temporary mortuary.

The UK National Disaster Victim Identification Unit. sitting within the National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC), works with police services, government departments, local authorities and other agencies to coordinate the national capability of the police service to respond to incidents involving mass fatalities.

In recent years specially trained teams from around the UK have been deployed to assist in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in July 2014 and the Shoreham Air Crash in August 2015.

National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for Disaster Victim Identification Chief Constable Debbie Simpson said:

‘Victim identification is never a pleasant subject to discuss but it is unfortunately a reality. When disaster strikes families need to be confident that the authorities are doing everything they can to identify their loved ones in a dignified and respectful way, whilst supporting any criminal investigation.

‘Importantly this process cannot be hurried. As frustrating as this can sometimes be, especially in a world of fast paced mainstream and social media, we have to be meticulous in our approach to ensure we achieve reliable scientific identification.

‘It’s not often we get to test working practises on such a scale and it’s really positive to see so many of our European colleagues involved. Effective evaluation and debriefing will help highlight good practice and any areas for development.’