CASE STUDY

must be treated with the greatest care and secured with the utmost scrutiny . While security for military nuclear sites is managed primarily by the Ministry of Defence , protecting the majority of nuclear facilities in the UK falls to the Civil Nuclear Constabulary ( CNC ). As a public safety agency , its officers are sometimes leveraged for additional police operations throughout the country .

“ Our job is to provide physical security for the storage , transportation and usage of nuclear material ,” said Joseph Shearer- Rust , Resilience Officer at CNC . “ To that end , we deploy many highly trained firearms officers across nuclear sites throughout the UK . We also support local police forces from minor incidents up to national emergencies .”

Serve . Protect . Secure .

In recent years , the UK has had repeated issues with terrorist threats . In light of this , the government has instituted a number of different operational responses and processes to both mitigate damage and minimise loss of life during these incidents , known as Marauding Terrorist Attacks . The largest of these , Operation Temperer , leverages agencies across the entire country .

To date , it has only been put into effect twice . First following the March 2017 bombing of Ariana Grande ’ s concert at Manchester Arena , and a second time following the September 2017 Parsons Green Bombing .

The CNC was among the responding agencies in both cases , dedicating a large portion of its personnel to each operation .

Outside of larger-scale operations like Operation Temperer , the CNC also responds to smaller threats and events . The challenge , notes Shearer-Rust , is balancing these responses with its primary duty . It cannot afford to neglect the sites it has been assigned to guard and is required by regulators to keep a certain number of active officers at each site .

Navigating the challenges of staffing shortfalls

To coordinate its staffing efforts , the CNC initially made use of phone trees and pagers . Several officers at each site had a list of individuals they were required to contact in the event of a staff shortfall .

This process was time-consuming and eventually grew obsolete . The CNC needed a more efficient , effective solution – a means of quickly enabling two-way communication with a large number of people . With this in mind , it began evaluating crisis communication platforms .

Eventually , the CNC ’ s search led it to BlackBerry ’ s AtHoc Alert solution . A powerful two-way emergency alerting solution , AtHoc Alert is able to send messages through a wide range of different channels including text , email , phone , desktop and radio . It also allows recipients to reply with a variety of preconfigured responses .

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