Pre-Hospital Care Podcast Vehicle Borne Attacks in Barcelona with Jorge Morales Alvarez
This is the second in a short mini-series focusing on vehicle-borne attacks having transitioned from a relatively rare method used by Terrorist Vehicle-Borne (TVB) attacks to becoming one of the most lethal forms of terrorism.
In Western countries, by 2016, TVB has resulted in just over half of all terrorism-related deaths. Their effectiveness and simplicity make vehicle ramming attacks an increasingly popular option for lone individuals who are three times more likely to stage a successful attack by groups of two or more. According to the global terrorism index, 2024 saw an overall 63% increase in terrorist attacks in the West, with terrorism conducted by lone individuals sharply on the rise. So, how much have we learned from the past the public report published in the United Kingdom in 2013?
A 2022 systematic review focusing on lessons learned from terror attacks from 2001 to 2018 found that despite the differences in methods countries social and political systems and casualties involved many of the lessons an issues identified with similar however these lessons continue to repeat themselves time again it concluded that the lessons identified did not appear to be sufficiently acted upon the failure to learn was further highlighted in volume 2 of the Manchester Arena public inquiry which focused on the response by the emergency services it identified the organisations involved in the response to the incident had failed to capture or learn lessons from previous multi-agency exercises it reported that there had been a failure to learn embedded key lessons from exercises. This was most relevant in the areas of shared situational awareness and joint understanding of risk and co-location identified key lessons, that subsequently reoccurred during the multi-agency response on the night of the attack.
On the afternoon of August 17, 2017, Barcelona was subjected to a vehicle terrorist attack, the 22-year-old assailant drove his van some 550 metres along the famous La Rambla, killing 14 people and injuring 125. We are 8 years on now from the attack. However, the lessons identified and reflections taken from the emergency service response are still as relevant today as they were at the time. Today, we are joined by Doctor Jorge Morales Alvarez, the Medical Director of the Catalan Medical Emergency System. To read more about the attack, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Barcelona_attacks
This podcast is sponsored by PAX.
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