Vocal Voices

A brightly lit and centrally heated room full of "experts" with their thousand page dossiers and memo-stick presentations and sat in their comfy chairs have criticised the emergency services for their response to the Manchester Arena bomb.

Well, what a surprise!

I wonder how they would plan and react to an unplanned and unforeseen event unfolding before their very eyes. My bet is sheer panic and a need to GTFO before they became a victim. It is easy to be critical when you were not at the scene at the time. All that these inquiries ever do is look for scapegoats and to lay the blame.

It was a suicide bomber who murdered those people not the emergency services; the experts seem to have forgotten that.

Surely there could have been a controlled entrance to the arena by the emergency services?, even if it meant one step forward and two steps back.

Agree with you WM, easy to lay blame when your sat behind a desk with all the facts laid in front of you.

It would be lovely to see these experts handling such a situation as they "know" everything

These reviews are done to see where we can do better and also to feed into training so that people are more prepared.

Of course when it gets into the hands of the press, they are dissing our "Hero's" (an over used sound byte which denigrates real Hero's).

Consider the alternative. In order to get over the shock and move and act as trained, as fast as possible, the first responders would have to be put into a similar situation. Like sending them to Ukraine to the front line or into cities that are being constantly bombed.

Not such a good idea is it.

The idea here is to find fault and problems then to work out what we can do to ensure these things don't happen in the future. Not to lay blame and blight careers. What do they want? That we tell them everything was OK and that nothing needs to be fixed and that they did a wonderful and fantastic job? Meanwhile losing the opportunity to learn for all first responders in the country and save lives?

This is how we learn and get better. Or it used to be.

I tend to partly agree with you, Suff.

There is some culpability here, Frank,with the length of time it took to respond, BUT that is with management, those further up the chain, not those on the ground who are the best of the best IMO.

What bugged me was that individuals and people on the scene were criticised for working with protocols and systems designed from theoretical modelling some time in the past. What happened showed that those protocols were not up to the mark.

And let us not forget that, unlike the military and their live firing exercises, the civilian emergency services cannot go "live" or do any "real world" exercises. They get one shot and it is always the real deal.

I am not against inquiries finding out what went wrong - that needs to be done - but I am against apportioning blame to those who were just doing their jobs to the best of their abilities whilst mayem, not of their causing, was going on around them.

Agree WM, naming and shaming is not the idea here. It is learning and finding ways to make things better.

The emergency response was a shambles, yes. But this was all caused by a suicide bomber who we had granted asylum to. As far as I can see he's the one to blame.

Suff wrote:Agree WM, naming and shaming is not the idea here. It is learning and finding ways to make things better.

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