More than 200 residents of Ashton Vale were left without support after a bomb scare last month
More than 200 people evacuated from their homes in South Bristol last month were left without any official support for more than three hours because no-one from any of the emergency services dealing with a suspected bomb incident told the city council’s emergency response team.
The head of the Bristol City Council’s team that deal with mass evacuations has apologised to people in Ashton Vale at a public meeting, and said they were ‘a little behind the curve’ because they weren’t immediately informed that a 100m evacuation area had been established on the housing estate.
The evacuation was ordered at around 7.50pm on July 22, when the Army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit arrived at the house in South Liberty Lane, and police evacuated residents in a 100m cordon.
Many of the estimated 200 residents of the streets around the house in South Liberty Lane went to friends or relatives nearby, but scores of people with nowhere close by to go to, were sent by police to the Ashton Vale Community Centre, just outside the cordon on Risdale Road. But no police officers were present to liaise with residents, and no-one from Bristol City Council’s emergency response team arrived at the centre to support those evacuated until just before 11pm.
It was only at that point, as the darkness fell and residents were uncertain about whether they would have to spend the night in the centre or find somewhere else to stay, that members of the council’s emergency response team arrived to assess the needs of the people there.
The public meeting heard from people who had been evacuated, who told council and police officers that many were elderly and vulnerable, and required access to medication, or were young families with children with special needs, for whom the evacuation was potentially traumatising.
The police cordon at Risdale Road during the emergency evacuation of residents (Image: BristolLive )
The first members of the council’s emergency response team arrived at 10.55pm – more than three hours after the evacuation began – and on Friday, Donna Liggins, the head of the council’s emergency response and resilience team, apologised for that and explained why it happened.
“We received the call just before 9pm to make us aware of this incident and that people had been evacuated,” she said. “I would like to apologise on behalf of everybody, because that’s a three-hour delay. We wouldn’t normally expect that to happen. We would expect someone from the police, fire and ambulance at the scene – any one of them – to call us way before that.
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“That has already been fed back to our agency partners and will also feed into the formal debrief. We will unpick that with our partners as to why that happened, to try to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
“It’s appreciated that the nature of the incident, it’s dynamic, it’s busy, someone else might have thought someone else had done it, I don’t know. So we were a little bit behind the curve, let’s say, which then tipped us into out-of-hours timings,” she added.
She told residents that, because the council weren’t immediately informed about the evacuation, by the time they were, members of the team who would normally be on standby during the day had clocked off and the council was ‘into out-of-hours timings’ by that point.
It took another two hours from the council first being officially told hundreds of people had been told to leave their homes to the first members of the council’s emergency response team arriving at the community centre. In the meantime, the community rallied round to help itself.
Local city councillor Ellie Freeman (Green, Bedminster) was there trying to find out more information and ask for more support, while the centre’s manager Kineta Hill was calling colleagues in the BS3 Community organisation to bring supplies from other community centres.
Councillor Ellie Freeman at the Ashton Vale Community Centre with bedding and pillows for evacuees (Image: BristolLive )
Ms Liggins explained that, had there been an official from the council present at the community centre in the first three hours of the evacuation, they would have begun doing the work of ‘triaging’ people to assess what they needed, in terms of emergency accommodation, medicines, child care support, clothes and food. That work did not get underway until after 11pm.
She said another learning point from the evacuation was that she said there are no 24-hour supermarkets open in Bristol. She told residents that, when it became apparent around midnight that there would be many people spending the night in the community centre, she tried to organise a ‘supermarket sweep’ to get essential supplies, but she and her team realised the only stores open at that time were smaller convenience stores.
So Ms Liggins herself decided to visit her local supermarket in her hometown of Swindon, and travel down to Bristol to make sure the 50 or so residents bedding down for the night would have breakfast supplies and other essentials. By the time she reached Bristol, the all-clear was given at just after 3am, and people were able to return to their homes.
READ MORE: Evacuated residents return home after explosives scare and night of uncertaintyREAD MORE: 21-year-old man arrested on suspicion of making an explosive in south Bristol
There were other concerns expressed by Ashton Vale residents – particularly around the potential offers of alternative accommodation. Some residents said they were told that evening that the council would be providing alternative emergency accommodation for everyone evacuated, but in the end that offer only applied to Bristol City Council’s own tenants. People who are owner-occupiers, or living in privately rented homes that were evacuated were told they would have to arrange their own accommodation, or stay at the Ashton Vale community centre.
In the event, however, the council’s offer of emergency accommodation for its own tenants was described as ‘impossible’. One young mum of three told the public meeting that it wasn’t until after 1am that she was offered emergency accommodation – but it would be in either Bath or Newport.
“In Bristol it is so hard to find emergency accommodation, especially during the middle of the night,” Ms Liggins told the public meeting. “There was a lack of information, and we do take that on board.”
Bristol Live has approached Avon & Somerset police to ask why there was a delay in informing the council, and a response is awaited.