What precisely drove the suicide bomber last May to detonate an improvised explosive device packed with shrapnel in a foyer of Manchester Arena will never be known. It was full of children and their parents who had been listening to the pop singer Ariana Grande. The trail of destruction the bomber left is all too evident: 22 lives lost; another 100 people injured; and thousands scarred by trauma. The review by Lord Kerslake into the emergency response to the attack, published on Tuesday, revealed that the disarray and havoc extended not just to the public, but to the public services sent to help.
In the stressful and chaotic scenes of a mass attack on a concert it is easy to understand that professionals could be overwhelmed and that even the best-laid plans could go awry. At the heart of the confusion on the night was whether there were more gunmen waiting to kill more people as they fled from the initial suicide bombing. This was not an unreasonable question: 18 months earlier, three heavily armed gunmen attacked a music venue in Paris and left 90 people dead in three hours.
In Manchester, the uncertainty over the number of terrorists led to a confused response. A police duty inspector declared Operation Plato, a plan for dealing with a suspected marauding armed attacker. If others had been told, as they should have been, emergency responders would have been kept 500 metres away from any zone of danger. Instead, paramedics who arrived at the arena within minutes of the blast were told by police it was a “suicide bomber” and went about treating victims. It was also fortuitous the ambulance service was not informed; otherwise, it might have pulled out medical staff who instead stayed and saved lives. Meanwhile, firefighters who heard the bomb go off were sent away from the scene and sat three miles away for two hours. It should weigh on our collective conscience that the report says “only coronial inquests can decide” whether lives might have been saved had fire engines arrived earlier.
Without an information system, the public cannot be reassured nor helped in distressing circumstances. It is shocking to learn that Vodafone’s 0800 phone line – designed to give information out in emergencies – suffered a “catastrophic failure”. Ministers ought to secure guarantees from the company the system has been made resilient enough.
A terrorist attack is traumatic for a range of individuals and institutions, but it most directly affects the victims and their families. Of all the different organisations involved, the media’s role is to understand what has happened and will happen next. However, the report says victims’ families felt “hounded” by the press. This raises questions over the ethics of reporting. The media must accept that being respectful to victims of terrorism is a weapon in the fight against it. Lord Kerslake’s report should be welcomed for highlighting that an effective response is not only critical for the management of an attack, but also for the welfare of the victims.
