Ripley Town Hall has been evacuated

Ripley Town Hall has been evacuated after a ‘suspicious package’ received

Transcript

00:00So at 10.09am this morning, emergency services were called to an incident at the Amber Valley

00:05Council House at Town Hall and Marketplace at Ripley. This was on the vigilant efforts

00:09of staff that noticed some suspicious packages within the building that had been opened and

00:15they were unsure of the content. So what they did correctly was call the services and ask

00:19for their assistance. Police, EMAS and FIRE attended today to carry out those processes

00:24to make sure that those packages were safe and to make sure that those that had come

00:27to contact with the packages remained safe. That led an operation where we had to identify

00:32where the packages were and they were spread across two different sites in the area and

00:36then go through a process of sampling the packages and confirming what was in there.

00:41Now what's been really good is those packages weren't dangerous to the public, we've had

00:44reports of no casualties at all and that's the way we expect it to be. We're now in an

00:48operation of winding down the incident, learning what's happened along with the police and

00:52EMAS and then looking to see where this goes moving forward. In terms of the local area,

00:57we expect it to be a complete normality in the next couple of hours and people will be

01:02able to return to work or return home. You say suspicious packages, what sort of suspicion

01:06was there? The packages were suspicious due to the contents. When the parcels were opened

01:11it wasn't what you'd expect to find in an envelope. There were some items that looked

01:16like a wooden block and another item then that wasn't identified but believed to be

01:22suspicious from those inside. We were able to take them away with our specialist teams,

01:27sample those items and confirm exactly what they were and once that was done we could

01:31confirm safety of all involved. What would you say to the staff who were on alert and

01:35made the right decision? It's really a credit to those staff that go through their training

01:40to understand what suspicious packages may look like and then act when they do find them.

01:44The staff will clearly be in a state of distress when things like this do happen. What we've

01:49seen from the Council House staff today is really good vigilance and then running through

01:53their processes to get their staff evacuated, keep their staff contained and then go through

01:58the normal evacuation procedures along with the emergency services. We've brought this

02:02incident to a really successful resolution in a very quick amount of time considering

02:06the potential harm that could have been caused.