What went wrong in the panic room?
Emergency workers blinded by blunders during Brussels Bombings
MARCH 22, 2017
BY HENK VAN ESS / Edited by Raf Njotea
Exactly one year after the deadliest act of terrorism in Belgium, secret documents of a debriefing reveal what really happened inside the panic room. Emergency workers had to work blind because the “usual” chaos after a terrorist attack. But the blindness was also caused by a series of logistical blunders.
THE DOCUMENT
The VERGADERING VAN HET HOOG OVERLEGCOMITE VOOR DE POLITIEDIENSTEN is a regular meeting between the highest Belgian police officials. I obtained the complete transcript of this meeting which was behind closed doors. This was done via rather simple web research, see HOW DID I FIND THE MATERIAL? at the end of this article. I also included some more elaborate research methods.
Exactly one year ago 32 civilians and three perpetrators were killed by three coordinated suicide bombings in Brussels Airport in Zaventem and Maalbeek metro station. The 167th edition of the police meeting was mostly dedicated to that event, called “Debriefing on what happened on March 22 2016” and lasted from 13.30 to 20.00 hours (May 18th, 2016).
THE CONTEXT
In a national meeting, five police bodies in Belgium scrutinized their own response to the bombings. What had gone wrong in our panic room? Each organisation explained what had happened and proposed changes on how Belgium should deal with terrorist bombings.
Most of the findings in the Zaventem Debriefings have extensively been discussed in Belgium in a special parliamentary hearing and some details were leaked later. I focus on the findings of the stress team, local and national police and the police ICT-department — debriefings that aren’t published in full detail yet and shine a brighter light on what went wrong.
THE FINDINGS
So, what is in the documents? The emergency workers had to work blind because of the usual chaos after a terrorist attack — I hate to use the word usual here. But the blindness was also caused by logistic blunders. Each of the five police bodies put on a hair shirt in the debriefing. All were worried about the negative effects of Belgium bureaucracy, the lack of knowledge in operating communicating systems and a failing communication infrastructure. The debriefing concentrated on safety and well-being of the emergency workers.
- Traumatised emergency workers needed more help
The Directie van de operaties inzake bestuurlijke politie (DOA) — a national coordinating police body — kicked off by telling how foggy the facts were the first few minutes after the bombings.
After saying that, they talked about that emergency workers had big problems to switch from one radio channel to another. This was already published in a few articles, but not the (probably obvious) reason. Why dit it happen? It happened “purely out of stress”.
Traumatised police personnel didn’t get help fast enough and wasn’t given the best possible help. “We can learn from the expertise and capacity of the Ministery of Defense here”, the policy body says euphemistically.
The local body claims that the police lacked armour “for units who had to go to a risky environment”. All police bodies complained about lack of training.
Three parties were involved: the city of Brussels, the province, and the federal government. Emergency procedures are not the same in each district. “There were plenty of ways to communicate” but during the aftermath of the bombings “it wasn’t always clear who was in charge”. That’s old news, but revealing is what this really meant in the first few hours.
The proper “chain in command” was not always followed, which must include at least two coordinators for each police body. Officials were busy trying to study what was the chain of command in the first place, by either looking up procedures or discussing with eachother what to do “on the spur of the moment”.
2: Brussels police: all went well
De Politiezone Brussel-Hoofstad/Elsene — the local police in Brussels didn’t talk that long and basically said, considering the circumstances, all went well in “great solidarity” and “a proper response to a emergency situation”
They did mention written “talking points” they gave the delegates in the meeting, which I couldn’t find.
3. Almost 50 cases of post-traumatic stress disorder
The Belgian national “aviation police” LPA Brunat counted 48 cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, reported earlier by De Standaard.
More details are revealed about the severity of the complaints. Emergency workers still have flashbacks, bad dreams and frightening thoughts. Some are treated by psychiatrists and need medicines to calm down.
4. Keep pushing, or no one will hear you
The fourth speaker in the debriefing was a person responsible for the ICT infrastructure for the police (DRI). He kicked off his findings by stating that 15 out of 26 radio towers in Brussels were overloaded after the suicide bombings, a fact well documented in the Belgian press.
The debriefing tells in more explicit detail why some emergency workers couldn’t reach other workers.
Many didn’t get any contact at all because they forget to hold the “Push to Talk” button of the radio system, also known as “press to transmit”. They were kicked out of the waiting queue the moment they released that button. “If they do that, they lose their place in the queue”, the police body concludes — and have to start all over again. Hundreds of fruitless efforts to reach co-workers were recorded. Hundreds of emergency workers weren’t able to make the call because the released the button too early.
The DRI critized the car trunk meetings (kofferoverleg) where officials take their time to discuss what to do, just standing near the trunk of a car. Details about these discussions are not given, but the DRI has a plan for action, another euphemism: “we need more effective radio communication.”
Together with the supplier of telecommunication, Astrid Communication, they came up with 6 changes in how emergency workers should communicate, all emphasising the underlying problems:
- more radio capacity
- more mobile radio towers
- monitoring of traffic
- more frequencies
- 6 levels of priority in traffic (now just 1)
- Closed user groups
5. The stress team: who do we help?
The stress team of 11 people, responsible for first aid to emergency workers, worked in the dark because they hadn’t full list of which people where working. They helped 520 people on March 22, 2016. They worked for 19 days. Most of the workers had short nights and had no time to cope with their own feelings.
Local authorities didn’t fully understand the “importance of talking” after such gruelling events. The stress team was not recognisable enough. Also the proper procedures weren’t followed.
Chairman of the debriefing, Jean-Claude Gunst from Antwerp, understands why things went wrong in the panic room: “It’s always the same problem. There are scenarios, but people have to follow them.”
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HOW DID I FIND THE MATERIAL?
All material was publicly available via Google up until January 2, 2017. I searched for every acronym I could find of any police organisation in Belgium (1) — which was no fun. There are a lot of committees in a country that is directed by linguistic communities (Dutch, French and some German).
The second filter was searching for just official documents. My best try for that is using “filetype:pdf” in Google (2). I restricted my search to the past year (3).
Responsible for the leak was “Sociale- En Rechtsbijstand Voor Lokale En Federale Politieambtenaren Van Belgie”, an organisation that has recently dissolved. It had over 20 internal police committee reports online without any direct hyperlinks to it. My guess is that a member of this committee took part in the police meetings and put the material on the site by accident — just to keep it safe.
Some other research I did for this article
Most police bodies wanted more GPI 48. I had no clue what this was , so here is how I helped myself:
I asked Google to find the unknown factor (1) in an official (2) Belgian (3) document. The acronym is about violence control. So they needed more training in that. Which makes me wonder: how much training do they get now?
The GPI 48 (1) is the term for violence control. The second part predicts not a word, but tries to find a number. Any number will do. Since I don’t know how high the actual stats are, I don’t do 0…400 or any other specific range. By entering 0… you tell Google to give you any number range. By now you should know how to make queries formal (3). The site:politie.be (4) pinpoints my answers to just those of the official police site in Belgium. With this, I get some (older) numbers.
NOTE :
If you use any details from this article, please include the name of the author Henk van Ess and the link to this article.
