Callout:
At about 9:30 on Thursday 4th, and in anticipation of excessive crowds, CEPO contacted the Northants County controller
to put RAYNET on a county wide stand-by and to ascertain how many operators were able to get out for the Saturday.
The county controller arranged contact with first contact points in each of the individual Northants groups, Daventry, Northampton and Kettering.

By 22:00 the Daventry callout list was complete and the group had Five operators confirmed as 'Yes'. By 22:05 one 'No'
had managed to re-arrange his appointments for the Saturday and was now a 'Yes'. We reported the 6 available back to the county controller.
We were informed at that point that CEPO was holding a briefing at 09:30 Friday at the county offices.

The Briefing outlined to us the CEPO plan to operate 2 Triage centres and 8 rest centres, 4 from each Triage.
To cater for 'distressed' mourners and casualties from any other incidents that may occur from having a vast amount of people
descend on Northampton.

At the beginning of the meeting the CEPO controlling the 'crowd' part of the operation did not think there would be a need for RAYNET.
We were only at the briefing out of courtesy because of the good communications support we gave them between rest centres at the Gas leak
and public evacuation of Corby some months earlier.
By the end of the meeting CEPO realised that there could be a good use for us and we were asked to attend.

As Althorp is within the DaventryDistrict, the County Controller gave the Daventry group the task of controlling the operation and CEPO
outlined what communications would be required and allocated members of the county services to be RAYNET liaison.
Daventry Group was given the task of manning Triage Centre B and rest centre B1(which became RAYNET control)
and Kettering and Northampton shared Triage A and rest centre A1, The remaining rest centres were to remain closed until required,
so as to not thin the social services and Red Cross out staff too much.

The Red Cross controller asked us to keep one person free for him as he expected the need of a radio operator at some point
during the day to act as his 'shadow'.

As the police expected the roads to be clogged by 10:00 it was planned to get all of the RAYNET operators into the area early and to spread
out from the main rest centres on foot when required. As we had 4 locations to cover we estimated that we needed 8 operators,
so as to allow shifts. The meeting ended at 11:10 and by 11:15 we had made contact with yet another Daventry operator who was able to turn out.
We now had a total of 7.
 

At 19:00 Friday, the Daventry controller was briefed with the information from the CEPO meeting. He then took over the callout procedure and arranged for the Daventry Group to meet up at Rest Centre B4, Duston Upper School at 08:45 Saturday, and take as few cars as possible  into the centre. This was to allow some of our vehicles to be outside of the clogged area.

By 09:30 the Talk through unit was set up in the Landrover + mast and was deployed near to the rest centre. This allowed us to run control from inside the centre on a 70Cms base, having no wiring running through the building  causing no disturbance to the medic teams inside.

The team assigned to Triage B made contact with the Medical personnel there and set up for the day. The triage B medics recognised us and there was no problem setting up as we had met and worked with them so many times before.

Rest Centre A1 was on the air before Control, and Triage A followed shortly. There were some problems setting up the Triage A station as the medic teams
were not informed of our attendance and resented RAYNET being involved in the communications.
This problem did not occur at triage B and shows the importance of regular training exercises with the user services.
 

There were a few problems with the signal from the County Controller whilst mobile  so the Talk through Landrover was moved  a little further from the B1 building.

The Police over estimated the crowd and traffic build-up and the so called 'sterile area' along the route did not come into effect until about 14:00, four hours later than they  had expected.

At 14:30, as planned, one operator was allocated to be the Red Cross controllers shadow.

The whole day passed without significant incident. None of the additional rest centres were opened, leaving us with an excess of operators,
medics and county staff. By general agreement it was decided that it was better to be over staffed and do nothing.
If there had been an incident the eyes of the world would have been on us asking why we were not more prepared.

Only 2 casualties passed through Triage B. One person just needed a moment to recover and was then on their way and another that needed more serious
medical attention. As there were Doctors and an A&E Sister on duty as well as the St John, Two counties Paramedics and Red Cross they were in good hands.

The crowd dispersed as soon as the cortege passed by them, around 15:30 and the operation ended at around 16:30.