Working under instructions from the Army, Police officers evacuated the area, whilst a 200m cordon was put in place, forming an exclusion zone around the bomb. This effectively resulted in the immediate closure of the entire Film Studios, affecting all current productions in 15 stages totalling 114,000sq.ft and resident on-site businesses plus 200 production offices.
One of the oldest tenants in 3 Mills Studios, Rigging Services was given no less than 30 minutes to gather belongings and leave site. Director of Rigging Services, Paul Fulcher comments on the effect of the imposed evacuation on the company's trading: "Whilst every disaster recovery plan serves as contingency, you can never be fully prepared. In our case, last week's event served as a good exercise for our company when we had to put into practice our previously theoretical plans. The end result was that despite difficulties, our business continued to operate as normal as possible using phone diversion facilities, gaining access to all servers and software through our hosted services, and providing rental and sales equipment from stock found in our sister Birmingham branch, whilst the warehouse technicians were reallocated to work on projects already planned at clients' own sites. Last week was for us a testimony to good planning, which prompts me to recommend to all in the events industry to have a practical disaster back-up plan in place".
Prudent advice: an army spokesman who said on the BBC that it is impossible to say how many unexploded World War II bombs remained in London and that more could be discovered as construction work takes place in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics.
(Lee Baldock)
