Hawkhills: Secrets and lies

THERE are all kinds of rumours about Hawkhills. In the public imagination, it's a shadowy, top-secret Government installation where the most secret plans for dealing with terrorist attacks or nuclear explosions are kept.

Stories persist of an underground nuclear bunker - even of a system of subterranean passageways.

Michael Charlton-Weedy grins. "It is said to be this top secret establishment at Easingwold where all the national emergency plans are kept," the former Army general says, in a clipped military accent.

"Rubbish! And that a lap-top computer containing all these emergency plans could fall into the hands of Al-Qaeda and we're all going to die. Rubbish!"

The truth is rather more mundane. Yes, Hawkhills is a Government organisation - it is part of the Cabinet Office. And yes, it is here that the people who would have to cope with national disasters and emergencies - everything from a worldwide flu pandemic to a terrorist attack or major flooding - are trained.

But that is all it is: a training college. The people here don't actually make plans to deal with terrorist attacks: they simply teach the people who do. So there is no repository of top-secret contingency plans stored away here for use in the event of a nerve gas attack or a deadly epidemic.

And those nuclear bunker stories? The Hawkhills chief executive smiles again. "No nuclear bunker. No secret passages. No secrets. This is an unclassified establishment."

It hasn't always been that way. Hawkhills' connection to disaster management dates back to 1937, when it was one of three centres set up across the country to provide training for dealing with gas attacks.

As war threatened, Mr Charlton-Weedy said, a nation still scarred by memories of the First World War was paranoid about the Germans using a new generation of gasses to attack urban populations.

After the war, the focus shifted to the Cold War and civil defence - presumably against the threat of nuclear attack. The centre's work was highly classified back then, and those may be the years when Hawkhills earned its reputation.

Behind the training centre itself there was a huge mock-up of a bomb-damaged town, known as Doom City, where training was given in dragging bodies from bomb-damaged buildings and coping with nuclear attack. There were even mock nuclear bunkers - but not, Mr Charlton-Weedy stresses, the real thing.

In 1989, the focus shifted again, away from Cold War tensions to more general emergency planning. That involves training experts to deal with everything from natural disasters, such as floods, to disease outbreaks, major industrial accidents, large-scale train and plane crashes and, of course, terrorism.

Despite post 9/11 tensions, openness is essential to the college's ability to do its job, Mr Charlton-Weedy says.

Every year, it trains about 7,000 people - local government emergency planning officers, policemen, health workers, firefighters, even businesses - in what to do in the event of an emergency. The whole point is for what they learn to be widely disseminated. "The only way to do that is to be as open with information as possible," Mr Charlton-Weedy says.

In many ways, the Hawkhills chief executive stresses, the work of the country's most important civil protection centre is far more important than it would ever be if it was the top-secret base many people suppose it to be.

He quotes Eisenhower: "A plan is nothing. Planning is everything." Hawkhills teaches the people who will have to cope with disaster about how to plan for it. If we ever do, God forbid, suffer a major pandemic, or a new terrorist outrage, the people who work to keep our lives together will have been trained here.

The college runs up to 50 training courses, many of them with sinister-sounding names, such as Planning For Mass Fatalities and Crowd And Public Safety Management.

But the whole point of emergency planning is to be prepared for the worst, Mr Charlton-Weedy points out, and to make sure that if the worst happens, life will be able to carry on in as normal a way as before. "We're not saying anything is going to happen, but it might happen and we've got to be ready," he says.

The key is to ensure that, in every region, there is an emergency planning co-ordinating group which has in place plans to deal with a range of disasters.

So, in this new, post 9/11 world, what are the major disasters emergency planners around the country are being prepared to deal with?

Surprisingly, terrorist attack is not top of the list, nor even second.

Top priority is given to dealing with a pandemic of bird flu, Mr Charlton-Weedy says.

In 1918, a flu pandemic claimed 830,000 lives in the UK alone - more than the number of Britons who died in the First World War.

The risk of a pandemic is small - emergency planners deal with "What ifs" which only very rarely come to pass - but it is real.

At the moment, bird flu cannot spread from human to human. To be able to do so, it would have to change, Mr Charlton-Weedy says. As a result of that change, it may well lose some of its potency, so that it would do little more than give people cold-like symptoms.

But it may not; it may retain the lethal potency it has now. If it did, and if it spread across the globe, the consequences could be devastating.

Emergency planners are preparing to deal with such a possibility. They are considering questions such as: at what point should schools be closed down? How could hospitals continue operating if all their staff were becoming sick? How could businesses continue to operate with up to 25 per cent of their workforce off sick? And, in the very worst case scenario, how would the authorities cope with burying or cremating a large number of dead?

So might there ever come a point at which, for example, people were asked to stay at home, for fear of further spreading the infection?

Mr Charlton-Weedy smiles grimly. No, he says. "At some stage, somebody has to go out and buy food. And there have to be people in the shops to serve food, and people to supply the shops..."

Britain came to a complete standstill in the winter of 1947, he said, when temperatures plummeted and the nation was already almost bankrupt from the war. Never again. "Standstill is not an option. The emergency planner's job is to enable normal life to go on, as best as possible. Unbeknown to most of the public, the Government is seriously on the case."

That's good to know. Let's hope experts schooled at Hawkhills never need to put their training to use.

Priorities: Terrorism and floods

After a bird flu pandemic, the next priority for emergency planners is flooding - especially in a city like York, which came close to inundation in 2000.

There is no doubt that, as a result of us going through a "different climate period" there has, over the last 20 to 30 years, been a "higher frequency of floods in York and elsewhere," Michael Charlton-Weedy says.

The worst-case scenario in future would be widespread coastal flooding coupled with river-flooding inland - the kind of thing that happened on the east coast in 1953, Mr Charlton-Weedy said.

Despite the new tensions of the post 9/11 world, terrorism comes lower down the list of priorities. Nevertheless, plans have to be in place to deal with terrorist attacks.

The most likely scenario is conventional bombs, such as those used on the London underground, probably in a major shopping mall, railway station, or airport - or anywhere where there was a concentration of people and buildings.

Emergency planners also had to be ready to deal with explosions that were not the terrorists' intended target, however, Mr Charlton-Weedy said.

"If a home-made explosive blows up on a kitchen stove, you have a hole in a tower block," he said.

So, big question: do Fylingdales and Menwith Hill put North Yorkshire at increased risk of a terrorist assault?

Not Fylingdales, he said. "Terrorist groups don't deal with ballistic missile interception."

And Menwith Hill? "There are Americans there, and they are not always popular with people who want to do nasty things.

"But our major concerns in York and North Yorkshire are flu and flooding."

Emergencies planners are trained to deal with at Hawkhills include:

* Flu pandemic or other outbreaks of disease* Flooding, drought and other severe weather* Terrorism* Large-scale public demonstrations* Industrial accidents* Crowd trouble, for example at football matches* Recovery of disaster-struck communities.

Bombs' over Doom City

Susan Thorn is the third generation of her family to have worked at Hawkhills.

The assistant librarian's grandfather, Leonard Toase, went to work there in 1937, when it first opened as an anti-gas training centre. He took part in training exercises - and is even featured in a photo taken during one, as a flat cap-wearing "casualty" strapped into a stretcher.

Susan's father, Des Toase, also worked at the centre. He was a joiner, but also took part in civil defence training exercises in Doom City, the recreation of a bombed-out town behind the centre.

One of his jobs was to keep supplies of bracken burning so that thick smoke wafted through some of the bomb-damaged houses, so as to make exercises about rescuing casualties as authentic as possible.

He also took part in night exercises, including simulated bomb attacks, Susan recalls.

Aircraft would fly over, and there would be simulated explosions at ground level. Lying in bed in the family home in nearby Easingwold, Susan the child would hear the explosions. "And I'd think: that's my dad," she says.

Doom City was demolished in the late sixties or early seventies, although the roads remain, among what is now effectively parkland.