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Diary - december 2007
Monday 3rd December 2007 19:30hrs – Casualty Care Training
A round robin session tonight. We are catching up on a few different skills we haven’t practiced for a while. We are given four scenarios to practice. The object is not to get distracted by the obvious injuries and stick to the ABC system we are taught to use. It doesn’t help when the casualty is desperately trying to distract you with his sore foot!
Later in the week we received an e-mail to inform us that the body of the man we were searching for in Delamere forest last month had been found. Apparently he was discovered in thick undergrowth by some walkers, about a mile outside of our search area. It was sad to hear this news, but at least it had come to a conclusion and his family would finally know what had happened to him.
Wednesday 12th December 2007 19:30 hrs – Training (Local Knowledge)
Tonight’s training is our annual Local Knowledge quiz. We take this evening very lightly, but developing a good level of local knowledge can prove essential in Mountain Rescue. It is extremely useful to know the area we cover in great detail. People can get lost in some strange places, so when you a searching around in the dark and come across a gully or a strange rock formation, knowing which one it is can make all the difference.
Nigel ran the quiz, which was made up of clues to items on the map, photos of local landmarks and pictures of the local pubs with their names blanked out (the only round I was any good at!). Some teams did very well at this quiz, some teams not so well. I’ll let you guess how my team did!
My conclusion from the evening – I need to get out more!
Friday 14th December 2007 19:30 hrs – Carol Singing
Every year we hold a fund raising Carol Singing event. It involves a few of us, wandering the local pubs, singing carols to the public and collecting for team funds. This year was the largest turn out we have had for a few years and rumour had it that some of the musicians had even been practicing. Here are some photos of the evening:
If you can bare it, you can even hear a few of our best ones here:
Alright, technically “The Wild Rover” isn’t
a Carol, but we sing it every year and it’s grown in to a bit of a
team favourite. We would like to say Happy Christmas and
a big thank you to the locals of Hayfield who kindly donated £229.07
to help our funds (or was it to get us to stop singing – you decide!)
Friday 21st December 2007 14:50hrs – Callout
It’s the last Friday before Christmas. I’m working from home today, getting the last few things sorted before I start my Christmas holiday. I had just had a phone call from my wife saying that as it was their last day for term, she was thinking of going to the pub after work with her colleagues. We had arranged to leave her car there, I was going to collect our children from their childminder later and go and pick her up. Just as I had finished my last jobs, I received a text message on my phone “Callout - RV Hut”, my plans suddenly changed. I frantically tried to get back in touch with my wife to tell her of the change in arrangements, but her phone was now switched off.
I started to get ready anyway, and finally my wife rang back to say that she had got the message and would pick up the kids. I headed out to drive to the hut, only to find that my childminder had parked on my drive in front of me, to pick my kids up from the local school. I had a frustrating ten minute wait while they all came back from school. I then had to get through the school traffic to get to the hut.
When I got there, we had a report of a man with an injured back and breathing problems at the top of Jacobs Ladder. This one was serious. Kinder 1 had already been dispatched. I was put in charge of Kinder 2 and was sent out along with Kinder 3 in the next Land Rover.
Mike had arrived before me and was the party leader of Kinder 1. Here is his account:
Mike: I’ve just finished work for the Christmas holidays and within 20 minutes of arriving home – Callout RV Hut comes through on my phone. Quickly change and hot foot it to the hut. As I live locally I’m one of the first there so I help turn the computer system on, start getting kit ready. Steve arrives and is straight on the phone – initial reports do not look good. Our casualty has collapsed with breathing difficulties, has back pain and it is bitterly cold on top of Kinder today. We start to guess what we might need as well as our usual kit, automatic electronic defibrillator, and lots of extra oxygen. A few more team members have arrived and four of us jump into mobile 1 and we are off.
Steve has already alerted Kinloss that we might be calling them soon for a Sea King to evacuate our casualty. As we drive up the track Kinder looks beautiful bathed in the pink tinged light of late afternoon. We drive past Moorgate … today the track is covered in inch thick sheet ice in places. Dave, fresh from his 4x4 training does sterling work getting us up to Stoney Ford – was that a look of concentration or a gleeful grin on his face? Here we are thwarted by the ice; we all jump out and let Dave take a run up, still no luck. We attack the ice with our ice axes to help give the tyres some purchase – I manage to snap the adze off my axe the ice is so hard! Our hacking works and Dave powers his way up the ice. We almost make it to Edale Cross but the ice wins, so we have to run the rest of the way.
Steve starts his examination of our casualty, my job today is site officer so I try to establish communication with base and also try to pick a good landing spot. Our man’s condition isn’t as serious as we were guessing but he is still very poorly – we do need that helicopter, and base promptly calls it in. We’d been told it would arrive in 45 minutes, after 30 Steve pointed to a shimmering light low on the horizon in the direction we expect our helicopter to come from… I quickly fire a miniflare to alert the crew of our location, but as soon as I’ve fired the flare I realise that in actual fact we were trying to signal the planet Mars! Mars didn’t signal back.
Me: Bernie had driven up as far as he could get. Dave was further up the track, but could get no higher as the ice was too bad. So we left the Land Rover and went the rest of the way on foot.
The track was very icy. We could quickly see why the Land Rover couldn’t make it all the way to Edale Cross. We passed Dave in Mobile 1 and collected the stretcher to take up to the Casualty site.
It was starting to get dark now and the temperature was dropping fast. This
was one of the clearest nights we had had for a while, but below us the
cloud was forming. It made for a spectacular sunset.
As we set out, John unveiled a new Rucksack. Apparently today was his last day in his current job and they had bought him a new rucksack as a leaving present a few hours ago. It still had the shop tags on it.
Pretty soon we arrived at the Cas site. By now the light was fading, we checked in with Mike, who was the Site Officer tonight and running the evacuation. We were told that a Helicopter was en route from RAF Valley in Anglesey, so all we needed to do sit tight and wait in the cold.
There was a rare phenomenon tonight of a temperature inversion, which meant that we were now above the cloud base and looking down on it in the moon light. I tried to photograph it, but there was not enough light. Here is an enhanced image to give you an idea of how it looked.
After about an hour of waiting in the increasing cold, we heard that the Helicopter had tried three different routes to us, but couldn’t get through the cloud below us. This was going to be a long carry off.
Mike: Kinder 2 arrive on scene with the stretcher, as the light starts to go. The flight path to Manchester Airport goes straight over Kinder normally, but aircraft are being rerouted – our helicopter must be close. We wait and we wait, and the commercial aircraft start flying over us again… where is our chopper? It happens again, but still no chopper. Base contact Kinloss who inform us that the Seaking could not get into us - very frustrating for us sat under a clear starry sky, but we know that the RAF do not give up easily. Time for plan B. We are going to have to carry our man down a very icy track slowly and smoothly – he is in a lot of pain (he’d slipped and landed badly – Steve has to assume the worse so he’s wrapped him up in a vacuum mattress to protect his spine from any further damage).
As the track from Hayfield was so badly iced up, we decide to go down Jacob’s Ladder into Edale – a shorter carry off and hopefully less icy. Buxton Team are called to assist and they despatch personnel and vehicles to Edale.
The carry off was slow and tortuous – sections of the track were very heavily iced so we had to don crampons, but as the ice wasn’t continuous walking on a rocky track on metal spikes was a nightmare! It isn’t a pleasant experience at the best of times, when you are carrying a stretcher with a casualty with a potential spinal injury you become conscious of every single step. Our man was in a lot of pain so Steve administered morphine – hopefully the remainder of the carry would be a bit more bearable for him.
We are soon caught up by another Kinder party coming from ‘our’ side
of the hill, and then a mixed Kinder and Buxton party coming up from Edale.
Despite the numbers helping, my body will remember this carry off for a
day or so!
We hand our man over to the ambulance service, and we return to Hayfield for a debrief, a tidy up and a quick pint. Quite a few members are in hot water already as they are late for dinner engagements so no-one really hangs around tonight.
Me: After our debrief, we cleared away
the kit we used tonight. Mike showed me what was left of the adze on his
ice axe.
I guess he was going to have to replace this one before we next go out. But with the conditions being as they are, who knows when this might be. As we settled down in the nice warm pub after the job, we discussed the night’s events. This one could have been very serious as if the man hadn’t been able to get a mobile signal, he would have been there all night and in those temperatures he would have been lucky to last the night.