Guernsey Press

Nuclear alert flares set off at Fort Le Marchant

RARE flares, which were too old to use, were set off yesterday by the Guernsey Police bomb disposal team and the canisters will be given to museums in the UK.

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PC Simon Hamon at Fort Le Marchant, where 54 flares supplied to Guernsey during the Cold War have been let off. The flares were issued in case of nuclear warnings about radioactive fallout or the start of a nuclear war. (Picture by Adrian Miller, 23340880)

‘The flares were supplied to the States of Guernsey many years ago for nuclear warnings in case of radioactive fallout or the start of a nuclear war,’ deputy civil protection officer Phil Martin said.

‘They were so old we had to get rid of them by letting them off, but it all went very well and we assisted the Guernsey Police who had it all under control.’

In total, 54 were let off between 9.30am and 4pm, with three bangs heard from each.

Some of the flares dated back to the 1980s and others as far as the 1960s, which were so rare that the Imperial War Museum did not have any.

As well as donating some to the museum in London, other discarded flares will be given to Cold War museums.

‘We didn’t use the flares during the Cold War anyway because we had a better system of making the island aware if there was any radioactive fallout,’ Mr Martin said.

All of the flares were thought to have been recalled in the 1990s but Guernsey’s had been missed and were now well past their use-by date.

‘They were stored correctly in the right conditions for a number of years and there’s better systems than flares now so the time was right to get rid of them.’

‘[Civil Protection] will trawl the common near where they were released in a few days to collect any remaining pieces of the rockets,’ he said.