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Diary - Febuary 2007

Monday 5th February 2007 19:30hrs – Casualty Care

It’s the start of another month and we are straight in to our Casualty Care session. Tonight is a session we were supposed to have at the start of December, but it was cancelled due to a Callout. Dr Simon, an orthopedic surgeon, has come over from Sheffield to give us a talk on how to handle limb fractures. His day to day job is sorting out people who have been in accidents and messed themselves up badly. He had a story for every injury we were likely to face.

In a somewhat gruesome session, we discussed the anatomy of the various joints of the body and how to straighten limbs which happen to be bending in unnatural directions.

We went through how splinting these injuries can be one of the best forms of pain relief. Here Geoff is demonstrating the light weight Kendrik traction splint on Howard. This is used to apply tension to a broken femur.

It was an unusual first session for our two new probationary members. Most of our training is fairly “hands on”, but this was quite an in depth discussion. Hopefully it will be a bit lighter for them next time.

Sunday 11th February 2007 09:00hrs – Exercise

A cold snap had recently put a layer of snow on the tops of the local hills. Up until this weekend things had been very cold, but a sudden thaw had started to clear the snow from the tops. I checked the forecast. A low cloud base, finally clearing in the afternoon to broken sunshine. It all sounded good, if a little chilly!

Mikey was running this exercise, and I had heard that he had been out on the Saturday, planning this one. Last year he hid himself in the middle of the Kinder plateau and we had to trek across country looking for him. He had spent hours in his tent and it took us the whole day to find him.

We met at the hut at 9am, to find out that the scenario was a man called “Lou Knee”, (get it! Very good Mike – that one must have taken you hours.) was last seen heading south from Edale Cross.

We were quickly divided into search teams. I was in Kinder 4 with Hamish as Leader, Colin, Paul and Alison. We sorted out roles, I offered to do the Cas Care, as I haven’t done it for a while and could use the practice. We jumped into a Landrover and Bernie drove us up to Rushop Edge to start out search.

We were to head over Brown Knoll, which is normally a complete bog. But as there were three foot snow drifts, we were hoping that the ground might be frozen. The down side was that the visibility was only about 10 meters.

We set off up the track, through the snow drifts. Navigation was very tricky as visibility was limited and the track we were following kept disappearing into the snow. As we moved across the moor, I kept hearing the odd “Aargh” as one of our team would plunge into a hole covered with snow. Hamish managed the best one, an 8.9 dive with full face plant. I finally worked out not to stand on any snow patch where there was no grass showing, as you had no idea whether it was an inch deep or waste deep.

The mist came in even further as Paul navigated us along a bearing towards Brown Knoll.

As we were searching along the route we tried blowing our whistles, but the wind was so strong, it was having very little effect. It was a long trudge through difficult terrain and I was just getting tired of jumping over gruffs filled with snow with hidden rivers under them, when finally, Brown Knoll trig point appeared out of the mist.

As we walked up to the Trig point the frozen ground finally decided to melt, and we plunged, knee deep into the mud.

We decided to take a well earned brew, only to be told on the radio to “Get on with it and get to Edale Cross as quickly as you can”. We packed up and headed off. The drifts were getting deeper and deeper as the wind was getting stronger and colder.

From out of the mist a group of fell runners appeared. I can’t decide if these guys running through the snow in minimal kit are brave or bonkers. But they just said hello and ran off into the mist.

A few more snow drifts later and we met up with one of the other parties at Edale Cross.

Eventually all the other parties were directed to meet us there. As they had been searching on their way, they had started to discover flags with a letter on them marking items of kit that the Casualty was supposed to have dropped. So far they had found N, K, E and R. Now my countdown conundrum skills are not great, but when another team said they had found a “W” I was starting to get worried. Fortunately it turned out to be a “D” and Mikey was cleverly spelling out “KINDER” with his clues. Obviously completely lost on us!

The only good thing was that they were showing up in a consistent area, so we were narrowing down the search. Rather than pass complicated search instructions over the radio, Geoff handed control of the search to Vinny, who was in charge of Kinder 1.

He got us to line out on both sides of the valley and we searched down the area where we had started to find the items. It was tricky going under foot and the wind was really blowing up the valley. Finally the mist lifted and we could start to see the area we were searching through. This was going to make things a lot easier.

As we got near the bottom of the valley, I heard a call over the radio from Hamish on the other side of the valley. He could see someone further along his search route. The only problem was that if this was Mikey, it meant that I would have to walk all the way to the bottom of the valley and up the other side. It looked a bit steep for my liking, and after a day of trudging through the snow, I wasn’t looking forward to the idea.

Five minutes later we got another message to say that he had found Mikey and the best part was that he didn’t have any injuries. Brilliant! This meant that we could meet them at the bottom and make our way back.

We all met up at the bottom of the valley and headed for the Landrovers. We were discussing how earlier in the day, one of the teams had searched close to where Mikey was found and that they had only just missed him. However it turned out that he hadn’t even gone out until after lunch, so that we didn’t find him to early!

We quickly forgave him for having to search unnecessarily when we found out that he had bought Microwave chips for us back at base. Just what we needed to warm up.

Finally, I thought a good way to describe the day would be to include some Haiku. For those of you unfamiliar with 15th century Japanese poetry, Haiku is a form of verse made up of three lines which conveys the emotion of a particular event. Anyway, here are a couple of my attempts, which I feel sum up the day:

This one is called: Wasteland

Arctic lands shrouded in mist.
Drawn out search through icy frozen waste.
Micro chips and beer make me smile.

And I have entitled this one: Frustration

Snow, mist and biting wind.
Ice and frozen turf rattle my bones.
Lazy git still in bed.

More Photos...

Wednesday 14th February 2007 19:30 – Training

Valentines day and I am spending the evening with my loved ones…..It is one of our mandatory training sessions on Water Safety. If you don’t do the training, you can’t carry out searching near water.

Neal runs us through the principals of working safely around swift moving water. We have a “hot zone” at the waters edge, a “warm zone” which is a controlled zone and “cool zone”, which is everywhere else. The main principles are to avoid getting into the water with a drowning casualty. This generally results in two drowned people!

The second part of the session involved looking at the safety equipment we use. The main piece of kit is a set of rescue flotation vests. These are similar to a standard life jacket, however they have a detachable connector at the back, to attach a rope to. If the rescuer gets into difficulty in the water and the rope is pulling them under, they have the option of releasing it and going with the current.

They are one size fits all, and we attempted to prove this by fitting our various sizes into the jackets. On the whole, with a bit of squeezing and adjusting, we managed to get in them!

Thursday 22nd February 2007 15:00hrs – Callout

It’s near the end of the day at the school where I work. Just as I have finished a project I am working on, I get a text message: “Callout RV Hut – Geoff”. I quickly got my things together and jumped into my car, just as the school bell rang! I then had the frustrating experience of having to wait for all the parents to collect their kids, so that I could get down the road. It seemed that this was going to be one of those journeys where I wasn’t going to make much progress. I was stuck behind a delivery driver who had three loads of boxes to drop off, smiling as he came back for each load. I even had to queue behind an extra wide vehicle taking up two lanes of the motorway. I work in Manchester and it generally takes me about an hour to get from work to my home, get my gear together and make it to the hut. So my involvement in weekday shouts usually involves carry heavy gear up to the Cas site, or acting as “stretcher fodder” to bring the casualty back down. The exception to this is where we have a protracted search, where it takes a lot longer to decide on the search plan and deployment takes a lot longer. Either way, we never know what our involvement will be until we get there. I finally made it home, grabbed my rescue gear and set off for the hut. As I was getting close, I could see that the tops were covered in low cloud, but it was just starting to lift.

When I arrived, there were a few people waiting around. They informed me that we had received a call from a man and his thirteen year old son, who were lost in the mist on the top of Kinder. Two parties had just been dispatched in the Landrover and parties from Edale and Buxton teams were already making their way up Kinder from the other side.

Not long after, Geoff received a call to say that the man and his son (with the help of some directions over the phone), had managed to get to the edge path and now that the conditions were clearing, they could see one of the other teams arriving. Our parties were recalled and it was just a question of waiting for them to get back. It had been a frustrating attempt to get to this callout, but at least there had been a positive result.