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Being a personal reflection on the importance of anniversaries

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  As anybody who reads my blogs knows, I think that that anniversaries are important.  One piece of feedback I received was to stop ‘banging on about them’.  I value feedback but I reject this suggestion because I have seen that recognising anniversaries can be a strong force for good.  This is true emotionally, but also practically.  They serve as landmarks in the temporal landscape.  They are an aide memoire of the lessons from major events and a benchmark to mark our progress or decline.  They also allow us to respectfully reflect on lives lost and loss endured.  Of course for those with personal connections with disasters anniversaries have a deeper and rawer significance. From a professional point of view we do well to remember the contributions of our forebears.  Their efforts are no less important than our own. Today my appointments took me through Moorgate station in the City of London and as always my thoughts turned to the horrors of 28th February 1975.  Next year will see th
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A Long Reply to a Short Post on Linkedin: JESIP

  This isn’t an article, it isn’t really a blog (although I will post it as such elsewhere).   It is really a comment on a recent helpful post on Linkedin by Rob Davis on the subject of the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Principles (JESIP).   Alas my comment is too long winded for the normal format. Before saying anything else I would mention that some posters have suggested that Mr Davis has pre-empted his own research findings.   This doesn’t worry me – some things are obvious even early on in research and any final conclusions that the author reaches will be subject to the rigours of the academic system that surrounds such high awards.   The fact that JESIP doesn’t always work is a well documented fact. JESIP is a simple, indeed a worthy, statement of good intent.   The principles are, in one sense, not capable of being doubted.   Perhaps this is the reason that criticism is sometimes treated as heresy.   As a member of the public my expectation that responding agenci
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Vigilance

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 I am grateful to the Crisis Response Journal who have published my recent blog:  https://www.crisis-response.com/Groups/352406/Blogs.aspx  Terrorism and vigilance   I have spent the weekend reading about the terrorist and similar events of the last fortnight: the attacks in Denmark and Norway, the conclusion of the major terror trial in Paris, the terrorism arrests in Cheshire and Hertfordshire (UK) and many other events around the world, writes Phil Trendall. Yet I detect that both the media and the general public see terrorism as something that is a long way down the agenda of things to be worried about. Perhaps, with everything else that is going on, this should come as no surprise. After all, for the first time in a generation we are seeing two superpowers in a state of confrontation and an economy that invokes 1980s nostalgia. But terrorism has not gone away and it is possible to be vigilant against more than one risk at a time. Moreover, state agencies have a vital role in consi
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Potter Bar: 20 Years On: A Personal Reflection

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  This week sees the 20 th anniversary of the Potters Bar Train Crash of 2002. It was caused by poor maintenance. It was caused by corporate failings.   Seven people were killed and over 70 hurt.   Like all such incidents the anniversary will be a painful day for many.   I am pleased to see that a local church will be holding a service to commemorate the event. There were a string of major railway accidents in the late 90s and early 00s.   Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Ufton Nervet spring to mind, although there were several others.   I had a small role at many of these events,   the experience of which has left me with a tiny insight into the enormity of bereavement by sudden disaster and an acute awareness of the impact of such events on responders.   I had a minor role in the response to Potters Bar.   I dealt with the media and in the days following I hosted the bereaved as Family Liaison Officers brought them to the scene.   I explained to them what had happened an
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Planning For Extreme Risks: War

 This blog has appeared on the website of the Crisis Response Journal https://www.crisis-response.com/Publisher/Article.aspx?ID=634811
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Annual Easter Rant

  Welcome to my annual rant about Easter.   It took a long time this year but the inevitable happened to me yesterday when somebody asked:   ‘when is Easter this year’, this was followed by the question: ‘is it early or late?   The answer to the latter question is always so unhelpful that I don’t know why it is asked. Look, it is quite simple.   In the western Christian tradition Easter Sunday falls on the Sunday after the paschal full moon, which is the full moon that falls on or after the spring equinox meaning that Easter Sunday can fall between the 22 nd March and the 25 th April in the Gregorian calendar.   Of course this has a knock on and back effect on other festivals such Ash Wednesday and Whitsun.   For years I wondered what happened to the Whitsun half term, but having Easter on castors meant that it sometimes fell at times that were far from convenient for schools and their pupils. Easter has always been problematic.   The current arrangements were worked out by the C
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Going Beyond the Incident Debrief?

 My most recent blog post for the Crisis Response Journal. This is a subject to which I will return.  It worries me that many organisations believe that debriefing an incident is all that is needed to gain a full understanding of what went well and what didn't.  We have seen at recent public inquiries that organisations are sometimes surprised at the evidence given by their own staff, sometimes years after the event in question. My thanks to CRJ for allowing me to post on this. https://www.crisis-response.com/Publisher/Article.aspx?ID=630966 March 2022
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