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By
Emma Campbell, BBC Oxford
In
a single warehouse on the edge of Bicester, more than a million
ration packs wait to be loaded.
Within
weeks, they'll all be in the Gulf.
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PICTURE
GALLERY
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Click
to see the Gulf supply team at work
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Two
and a half million of them had already been sent out from this base
in the first two months of the year, along with tents, uniforms
and even shower blocks.
You
name it - it all comes from the depot at Graven Hill, just south
of the town.
If
all the containers and equipment sent from here in those two months
were laid end-to-end, they would stretch the length of the M40.
It's
no easy task getting that much food and equipment out to the 40,000
troops who need it.
A network
of railway lines run through the site. Containers loaded in Bicester
are transported directly to the coast or across the county to RAF
Brize Norton, then straight out to the Gulf.
Getting
it right is essential to Colonel Chris Murray.
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| Colonel
Chris Murray says everything is checked |
"When
we despatch a container from here," he says, "we are conscious
it's going to be unloaded, probably in the desert, perhaps at night,
so we despatch it in good order.
"If
there's a construction pack for Royal Engineers, and there is a
generator inside the container, it will work - we've checked it."
Nearly
all the staff at Bicester are civilians. For
them it's been a testing couple of months. Their workload has quadrupled.
"We've
moved the same volume of stores as we did in the last Gulf War,"
says shift manager Mick Thorne.
"It's
been just a great effort by everybody to achieve that - but we've
done it in half the time that we did then.
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| Electronic
tags track every package from Bicester |
"Those
guys are relying on us to get the stores out there for them to be
able to do their job."
Urgent
supplies go by air. In the main warehouse, they can pack 60 aircraft
pallets a day.
That's
the equivalent of twenty 40-foot lorry loads.
Keeping
track of each pallet involves using electronic gadgetry, says Warrant
Officer Jonathan Kerswill of the RAF.
"We
attach a tag to each aircraft pallet, so at any time I can tell
where that pallet is in the world," he says.
"Say
somebody from Kuwait phones me and says, 'Where's that pallet?'
"A
couple of seconds, a click on the mouse and I can say, 'Yes, it's
departed Bicester, it's arrived at Brize Norton, or it's on its
way into theatre.'"
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