Training staff and empowering them to act after an acid attack can be the difference between someone losing their sight and keeping it, a training exercise heard yesterday. The second ‘immersive’ training morning in London, at Cargo nightclub in the borough of Hackney, saw more than 100 hotel, shopping mall, club and other building managers, NHS and police as the audience on the dance floor, while volunteer police officers played the part of clubbers hurt by acid.
Cargo security staff responded by bringing jugs of water from the bar to wash away the acid. After talks by London police and forensics, fire and ambulance, during a question and answer session Chris Hampson of the BSIA trade association from the floor asked organisers their key message. Met Police Supt Louis Smith replied: “We are not the first responders in this, the public are. The better you prepare for this – simple things like training your staff, putting water in accessible areas, and empowering your teams so that they can step in – can be the difference … we just need to cover that gap between the incident happening and us arriving.”
More words and pictures in the March 2018 print issue of Professional Security magazine.
Neil Parham of the Met Police, the compere of the training morning, stressed the need for water, whether bottled or tap – the 999 responders would bring specialised saline water in bags – to wash the corrosives off the victims, while taking care not to spread the acid further onto the victim, or splash any on others. Other points included the sheer amount of water that fire crews might apply to victims – Cargo staff had to sweep it outside – to dilute the acid, and hence the need to guard against hypothermia, if victims had their affected clothes removed and cold water poured on them. Search regimes at club and pub doors were among other topics raised and covered.
The organisers reminded the observers of the NHS England ‘three Rs’ advice, brought out last year:
– report (dial 999),
– remove (clothing carefully, perhaps with scissors)
– and rinse (at once, in running water).
Retailers Wickes, B&Q, Screwfix, Wilko, The Co-op, Morrisons, Waitrose, Tesco, John Lewis and Homebase recently signed voluntary commitments on the responsible sale of corrosive substances.
Picture by Mark Rowe; outside Cargo in Rivington Street, Shoreditch EC2A.
For more on noxious chemical awareness, PPE and regulations visit the Health and Safety Executive website: http://www.hse.gov.uk/coshh/basics/control.htm.
