East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service specialist equipment after 9/11

Tony Blair’s government recognised that multiple, large scale attacks on the UK would be difficult to cope with effectively by individual fire and rescue services, and the special programme they came up with aimed to provide a co-ordinated national response to various catastrophic events.

The multi-million nationwide programme was called New Dimension and provided fire services with a range of equipment, people and training to counter potential terrorist attacks and environmental disasters.

East Sussex Fire Rescue Service (ESFRS) received two pieces of this specialist equipment, a high volume pump and a mass decontamination unit.

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Keith Ring, 63, executive support officer at ESFRS helped work on the New Dimension Programme.

He told the Argus that he was at the Fire Service College in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, on that fateful day in 2001, and said they were “flabbergasted” when they saw it on TV.

He said: "We knew straight away that many of the emergency service staff who were on the scene would probably not walk away from it.

Mr Ring joined the service in 1979 and served for 34 years as a firefighter, before moving into an administrative role for the service in 2013.

In 2002, he went on a five year secondment at Her Majesty’s Fire Service Inspectorate to help with the New Dimension programme, the largest project the UK fire service had ever faced.

East Sussex Fire Rescue service received a high volume pump and mass decontamination unit.

He said: “East Sussex Fire Rescue Service were given by the government a mass decontamination unit as part of the response and one of the high volume pumps.

"So we have got two national assets in East Sussex Fire Rescue still to this day, although their functions have changed slightly."

The mass decontamination unit was designed for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) threats and was designed for the public and service staff who had been affected by what is known at the time as a dirty bomb.

Mr Ring added: “If you look at all the CBRN stuff under terrorism, all the threat was around what they called at the time, a dirty bomb.

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“That bomb would be set off and it would contain some nuclear or radiation material within the bomb, so it could contaminate a lot of people.

“These mass decontamination units, you can set them up anywhere and there’s a system in place for processing members of the public or service staff who may have been contaminated through a de-robing, showering process and a re-robing process.”

While Mr Ring has never had to use New Dimension equipment himself, he has been involved with using urban search and rescue equipment that was also provided as part of the New Dimension programme.

He said: “I have never been deployed with mass decontamination units or with regards to the high volume pump, although I have been at incidents where the high volume pump has been used.

“Obviously we try and look at multi-use as well so it was also able to be used for large fires as well as removing water and pumping water from one area to another.

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“It was also able to be used to provide high volumes of water at a fire and we’ve used it many occasions for that.

“Other stuff which I was involved with, it helped the UK develop the response to flat structure work for the urban search and rescue side of New Dimension.”

Picture by Robert Stainforth. The Buncefield fire near Hemel Hempstead.

Before the New Dimension programme, fire services were not specifically equipped to deal with large scale urban search and rescue incidents.

Three examples of three major incidents in the country that have required the use of New Dimension equipment were the Buncefield fire at an oil storage facility in Hertfordshire, the 2007 summer floods all across the UK, and the Warwickshire warehouse collapse in November 2007.