West Sussex County Emergency Centre at Chichester is not your usual council emergency bunker as it has no blast protection or fall out protection. It was built in the 1960’s in the basement of County Hall during the height of the cold war. The basement is still used as the Emergency Centre for West Sussex and is still an active department run by the emergency planning department who kindly allowed access and gave us an excellent tour of the facility as well as lots of information about its work. There are several maps on the wall and a small room containing the SX2000 County Emergency Communications Network (ECN) in its Faraday cage. In addition there was an emergency generator in a small area off to one side. Air ventilation was supplied but we couldn’t find any filtration. There was in a series of a cupboards a very large stock of PDRM82 radiation monitors, approximately 400 of them!
