A TRAINING exercise to test how the county's emergency services would respond to a major nuclear accident at Barrow's shipyard has been carried out at Furness General Hospital.

Staff at the hospital donned special suits and worked with firefighters to safely decontaminate 'casualties' who had been infected by a radioactive substance.

Stuart Hosking-Durn, who led the team to resolve the emergency, said: "We do exercises like this so that on the day everybody knows what they are supposed to be doing.

"These events are highly unlikely to ever happen and as such the lack of training could lead to an organisation not being able to cope if such an issue ever arose.

"Thankfully we have never had a live contamination incident but this kind of training allows the team to be able to respond appropriately. It's like any skill, if you don't practice it regularly you lose it - practice makes perfect."

The scenario was code-named "Indigo 2016," and involved Cumbria Fire and Rescue, the North West Ambulance Service, Cumbria County Council and BAE Systems.

Numerous actors were hired to play contaminated victims and fill in as hospital, ambulance and fire staff for the routine exercise which takes place every three years.

Mr Hosking-Durn added that it was important to do these exercises regardless of the fact that a nuclear incident is unlikely.

He said: "From a hospital's point of view, the objectives we set ourselves from the outset have been successfully achieved.

"However, there will always be lessons that can be learnt and this time we learnt a lot about how to communicate with one another, which will allow us to strengthen ourselves for future operations."

Jonathan Burgess, Cumbria County Council’s Resilience Manager, said: "The county's response to emergencies in Cumbria is well-developed and was most recently tested for real during the recent floods.

"Although today's test scenario in Barrow is different, the multi-agency command and response structure that we’re testing is the same. These exercises always throw up new issues and we learn new things, helping us to make them even more robust.”

BAE Systems has been building nuclear-powered submarines in Barrow since 1959 but so far there has never been a nuclear accident.

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