Portland Port hosts huge marine training exercise
It gave services a chance to practice their skills on the water
A huge, three day, multi-agency training exercise has been held off the coast of Portland, hosted by Dorset's Marine Policing Team.
It included scenarios where 'protestors' were both in the water, and on vessels, to allow services to practice how they'd deal with an incident.
As well as Dorset Police, officers from Hampshire, the Thames Valley, Avon & Somerset, the Met and Essex Police were involved - as well as the RNLI, HM Coastguard, UK Border Force, the National Crime Agency, Ministry of Defence and more.
Superintendent Chris Naughton, of the Operations department, said:
“Multi-agency exercises such as this are critical in ensuring that we work alongside colleagues to ensure we have all the skills we need to tackle any threat on our waters so we can protect the public and our marine community.”
Chris Chant, Director of the Joint Maritime Security Centre, which is the Government’s coordination organisation for maritime security, said:
“Our role is to help agencies to understand and work together to respond to complex security threats at sea.
“This exercise was held at Portland Port to test tactical responses to a series of difficult challenges and incidents at sea and on vessels and gave those agencies taking part the opportunity to think about how they would respond tactically to threats and incidents.
“It is important that partners work together to practice and plan for incidents like this because working at sea is particularly challenging, the risks are wide and the threat can be significant."