Bunker was just right for the recent cold war

IT is simply called The Bunker.

Six feet below Scottish Borders Council headquarters in St Boswells is a lead-lined emergency co-ordination centre, originally designed as a Cold War nuclear shelter and equipped with its own air, water and electrical supply.

Today it is the base for major emergencies, including the Beast from the East, and also major events such as the Jim Clark Rally.

Jim Fraser, emergency planning officer at Borders Council, said: “We ran the operation 24/7 running 12-hour shifts from the Tuesday until 6pm on the Sunday, and we were brought in by 4x4 during the red ‘do not travel’ period which was quite hairy as it was very deep snow.

“We established a Resilient Communities initiative around five years ago, where we have a co-ordinator in each of the 40 or so local communities.

“They are trained and equipped with hard hats, personal protection gear, jackets, thermal gloves, foot grips, snow shovels, first aid kits, torches, sandbags and road salt.

“They do regular training for things like missing persons, train crashes and power cuts, and you might have up to 50 volunteers in these communities, and they do exercises in things like missing persons, train crashes, power cuts and Prevent (terrorism training).

“We got early indications from the Met Office that there was bad weather coming, so I circulated it to the core response group of senior managers, and when the yellow warnings started to come in we set up a commend structure for social care, education, roads and neighbourhood services.

“We alerted the public well in advance, around five days ahead, through our messaging system which reaches about 5,000 people in local area in the hope the elderly people would prepare in advance, get bread and milk in and not go out during the bad weather.”