Grenfell Tower: Hundreds of Wolverhampton Council staff given emergency training
Around 200 council staff have received emergency training and rest centres have been identified as part of a fire safety review in Wolverhampton in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster.
The city council has trained volunteers to carry out specific roles following the Grenfell tragedy and the terror attacks on Manchester and London.
A special team has identified five main buildings and 21 secondary sites to be used as rest centres. The main bases have the capacity to shelter up to 620 residents during the day and 256 people at night.
A fire safety meeting at the council today heard that the plans ‘provide reassurance should a similar disaster occur in our city.’
The council-owned centres have special rest centre equipment boxes located on site to reduce the time taken to establish the centre when needed. If all five rest centres were needed, they could cater for a total of 2,360 people during the day and 1,180 people at night.
It was revealed that representatives from the Molineux, the Mander Centre, Jaguar Land Rover and Wolverhampton University attend quarterly meetings along with members of the emergency services and NHS to discuss a city-wide response to a disaster.
In the event of a major incident, council directors and senior managers would be called to a major incident control room to co-ordinate the response centrally. The meeting was told that in the event of an emergency, the council would email fire service command at the scene with the names and addresses of vulnerable residents.
Live exercises during which emergency shelters are physically set up take place annually. They test the council’s ability to respond to large fires, building collapses, toxic spillage and floods.
The council already carries out weekly emergency planning training under the banner Exercise Clockwork. As a result of lessons learned from these sessions, the current rest centre plan is being revised.
A team from Wolverhampton was activated earlier this year to respond to three major incidents - Storm Doris and the London and Manchester terrorist attacks - and fed back information.
Today’s meeting of the scrutiny scoping group follows a similar one in June, the week after the Grenfell fire which killed an estimated 80 people.
