Some of the July 7 terror coverage in the August print magazine.
It was business as usual, almost, at the Imperial War Museum set of sites in London, reports Gerry McCartney, who as head of support services is in charge of security.
Describing the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, he said: “We established whereabouts of any staff who had not made it to work; all accounted for. We conducted physical security checks; doubled up staff on our main entrance for bag check procedures; offered advice to visitors on what was happening, and the vast majority continued with their visit as normal. We allowed visitors to use our land-lines to call home when their mobile networks were overloaded. We brought forward last admissions by an hour to allow some staff to get away soon after 4pm because of transport difficulties, but still allowed visitors to complete their visit. The last of them left at 5.45pm which is just 15 minutes earlier than our usual 6pm closure. On the Friday it was a fairly normal day. Only one member of staff was delayed getting in. Pre-booked school groups were cancelled on the advice of the police, but general visitors were pleased to find that we were open. Similar actions took place at our other London branches [HMS Belfast].” p
At City University London, the security effort was largely around reassurance – of people on the premises; and their loved ones, ringing in worried.
Colin Holland, security services manager, said: “As soon as we started to get the reports in across the media, we put into action our emergency response plan within the university, setting up an emergency information room, where we gathered the information passed to us from the [City] press office.” While summer is a quiet time for academic premises, staff were fielding many ’phone calls from concerned parents and other relatives, unable to reach City’s largely overseas students by mobile. On the intranet, and by e-mail, staff and students were kept updated. Colin added: “What we did on the day was increase the number of internal and external patrols by security staff; more of a reassurance measure, so people on our premises could see more physically our staff at work.” As for UK-wide alerts due to left bags, he added that City is fully briefed to be vigilant; to challenge anyone walking away from a bag; and to tell security of things unattended.
More next month.
