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Diary - February 2008

Sunday 3rd February 2008 11:38hrs – Callout

Sunday morning and I have decided to take the family to the cinema. I talked them into a lunchtime showing as every time I go to the cinema we seem to get a callout and the earlier we go the less likely we are to get a shout. Sure enough, just as the film is starting, I get a text message saying “Callout RV Hut”. Fortunately I had set my phone to vibrate, so I didn’t disturb the rest of the cinema. I then spent the next ten minutes trying to get whispered messages to my wife to explain what was happening. Just as my children were giving me their best “You’re not going to drag us away again, Dad” faces, I received another text message. To my great relief it said “No more people needed”. Phew, I could relax.

Apparently, Darren had received the Callout while he was at Buxton’s base returning some smokes that were used with the Helicopter during the last callout. A walker had broken his leg at the Downfall, so Darren immediately called the team out to help. However as soon as he had done this he found out that the Buxton team were having a Helicopter training session at their base and had a Sea King parked in the back field. The Helicopter went straight to the injured walker and had him in Hospital within half an hour of the call – a possible record.

Just for good measure, the Buxton team also sent a backup squad to the bottom of Kinder on full blue lights, in case they needed to carry him off. So our team members who made it to the callout spend an hour waiting at the hut until they were stood down.

Tuesday 5th February 2008 19:30hrs – Casualty Care Training

Tonight’s training had been moved to the Tuesday night as Dr Ian was supposed to be running the session, but he had been unable to make it. Instead we had an evening of practicing Primary and Secondary surveys. This is the system of making sure that the important factors in keeping you alive are checked first, then you can go on to look for other problems. It can be quite tricky, but it pays to follow our standard system of Airway, Breathing, Circulation, Disability (Consciousness / Shock) and Exposure and Extremities. For those that haven’t noticed that’s A,B,C,D,E (it’s best to keep it simple for us).

We had a hands on session, swapping round between being the casualty and having a go at it.

It’s always difficult trying to make these situations reflect the real world, people aren’t always lying in an easily accessible position, so we tried to make it a little more difficult. I think in this one the bar is supposed to be a large rock face, but it just looks more like Dave on a normal Friday night!

Tuesday 12th February 2008 13:00hrs – Callout

I am working in Liverpool all day today. I’m in the middle of a big job, so when I receive a text message saying “Callout RV Hut”, I know I have no chance of making this one. Here’s Chris’ version of the events:

Lunchtime on a Tuesday, just getting ready to eat after a busy morning cutting back some very prickly holly brash in glorious February sunshine. Phone goes off – text message CALLOUT RV hut. Dash around collecting my kit and trying, without much success to eat some food. Drive up to Hayfield – seems interminable with a car trying to keep 5km/h lower than the speed limit in front of me!

As soon as I arrive don’t even make the hut but rushed into a Team vehicle as the third member of the Kinder 1 hill party. Learn from Steve & Colin (the other two party members) and Paul (our chauffeur for the day) that there is a casualty at Red Brook, on the Kinder plateau, with a broken leg and that an air ambulance is on the way but not the usual one from the East Midlands but one from Warwickshire. Even with an air ambulance on the way we need to get to the casualty as quickly as possible because there are all sorts of reasons why a helicopter won’t arrive or be able to lift a casualty off. Steve has a bright idea “lets go through Upper House”. This would certainly have got us up to the plateau more quickly but the locked gates refused to unlock! So Paul reverses back with beeper going 100m or so, and drive up Broad Clough having to negotiate a fallen tree on the way (Paul says must come back with a chainsaw).

The three of us set out with lots of gear to carry – Colin has the bright idea that with our new party hill bag he can carry the whole of the party kit on his own.

He soon learns to regret this decision but Steve can’t help because he has gone ahead to try and reach the casualty with our first aid kit as quickly as possible and I offer but am lumbered with the bulky and awkward vacuum splint bag and Colin doesn’t see it as a great swap! Nevertheless he does make a fine Sherpa. We reach Cluther Rocks and we’re hot – it’s like a summer’s day! We see a helicopter departing the plateau (the North West Air Ambulance so it transpires). We get the stand down and return to the hut where 20 or so Team members have turned out despite the fact that it is a working day.

Another callout where the casualty may not even have been aware that we had been in action but we didn’t know at the start of the process…

Wednesday 20th February 2008 19:30hrs – Training

Tonight is a training session on Water Hazard Awareness. This is about how we safely search areas around water, without getting hit by passing fridges! It also deals with how to get our team members out of the water, once they have been hit by the proverbial passing fridge.

Most of the evening was spent recapping our procedures and equipment. After the theory, we had a look at the Personal Floatation Devices, and had another go at trying to make the “one size fits all” idea work.

Sunday 24th February 2008 08:00hrs – Exercise

An early start saw us bleary eyed at the hut for 8am. The exercise was based around two men missing on Kinder, one of which had made his way down passed the reservoir to raise the alarm and then gone back up to help his friend. The reservoir element meant that as part of the search someone had to search the edge of the water, using the kit we looked at in the training session. What a remarkable coincidence!

I was put in Ken’s team and we were sent off to search an area of Kinder, where they suspected the casualties might be. We were also accompanied by Haley from BBC Manchester radio, who was spending the day with us to find out what life is like in the team.

Our initial search pattern saw us sweep searching a large chunk of the West side of Kinder. It was a bit of a slog, but we lined out and worked our way to just below the top of the hill. Ken had the problem of trying to search and be interviewed by Hayley at the same time. You should know never to ask a man to multitask.

Once we had completed our search area and arrived near the top of the hill, we were immediately given a new area back down at the bottom of the hill. We plodded down and swept through the next area, just as the rain decided to come in.

Having cleared this area, our next task was to sweep the adjacent area back up to the top! About half way up, we heard on the radio that another team had found one of the Casualties. They were just below the summit and we were sent straight up the steepest part of the hill to help with a carry off. As we arrived we met up with another team making their way to the Cas site, except they had been given the task of carry up the heavy gear. Our plodding up and down the hill wasn’t looking quite so bad. Almost as soon as we arrived, they packaged him up and were ready for us to leave.

We carried the casualty (Richard – an ex-team member), down through the boulder field, where he had kindly hidden himself and on to steep grassy ground. This meant that we could “sledge” the stretcher and didn’t have to carry it as much. We sledged him down to a safer, warmer area and then headed back up to carry on searching for the final missing casualty.

With more teams now concentrating in this area, we could effectively line sweep the section we suspected he was in. In order to set up this line we were asked to form up at the bottom of the hill and sweep up to the top. The only problem with this was that we were already near the top and would have to walk down to then sweep back up again. This was turning in to a bad joke. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera handy to show you Ken’s face when we were given the instructions over the radio. We made our way down and then swept back up the hill again. Eventually one of our team came across the final missing casualty. As I was allocated the task of Casualty Care in our team, I made my way over to the site. Ken had done an initial assessment and then handed him over to me along with Chris to assist.

It was a cold day and he had been sat there for several hours, so we quickly got one of our Cas tents over the three of us. It is surprising how quickly the air warms up once a few people are inside these bivi shelters. I followed our standard system which we train to: Check Airway, Breathing, Circulation, Disability (level of Consciousness) and Extremities (Major injuries to long bones). He had a head injury, which looked fairly superficial (thanks to some excellent work with fake blood!), even though he had been down the hill to raise the alarm and back up again, we put a collar on as a precaution. He was doing an excellent job of trying to distract me with a lower leg injury, but the more important issue is to make sure he doesn’t have any life threatening injuries before moving on to the more painful, but actually less important injury. Having ruled out head and spine injuries I checked him down until I got to his lower leg. On removing his boot and sock, they had done another good job with fake bruising around a convincing broken leg. I checked (and managed to find!) the pulse in his foot. This meant that he was getting a good blood supply to his foot and I didn’t need to take any further action. We splinted his leg and arranged for a helicopter evacuation, though this was only going top be in theory today as no helicopters were available for an exercise.

At this point, once the evacuation had been arranged, we could end the exercise. This just left us to carry the heavy equipment down in time for a debrief and a quick trip to the pub.

Friday 29th March 2008 20:00hrs – Team Meeting

A straight forward meeting tonight, with a minor moment of excitement at the start, where we voted on changes to the team constitution (I obviously need to get out a bit more). We almost broke the record for shortest meeting, with straight forward reports from all the exec members. Once finished, we adjourned downstairs to the pub.