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Diary - november 2007

Saturday 3rd November 2007 18:30hrs - New Mills Bonfire

Every year we help out with the local Bonfire. We basically stand at the entrances and rattle buckets to collect money on the way in. Darren, our Team Leader, runs a professional Fireworks display company and he puts on the show. Last year the Bonfire committee donated £1000 to us from the profits and as the weather was good this year there was an excellent turn out and a great show.

Sunday 4th November 2007 12:30hrs – Callout

Sunday lunchtime and today was an unusual Sunday. It was my daughter’s 9th birthday party, which she decided was going to be at the cinema this year. Fortunately I had remembered to switch my phone to vibrate, or when it went off I would have had to suffer the wrath of a dozen 9 year old for disturbing their enjoyment of “Stardust”. Just as the film was almost getting to an interesting bit it started to vibrate. It was a callout with an RV at Macclesfield forest. I thought for a moment about marching them all out to go to the callout, but I realized that 9 year old girls are quite capable of violence. I sat wondering what was happening until an hour later when I received another text with a stand-down. Apparently, the Buxton team had been called to look for a man who had a seizure, but didn’t know his exact location and thought he could be somewhere in the forest. They called us to help find him, as it would be urgent to get him to hospital. It turned out that he was located in open ground and the Air Ambulance could land close to him.

Monday 5th November 2007 19:30hrs - Casualty Care

Dr Simon is with us tonight, to give us one of his traditional technical talks on anatomy and how to handle serious trauma. His presentation is full of the usual lashings of gore and horror, but there is nothing better than hearing this information from someone who does this kind of thing every day for a living. It is an excellent session and he answers a lot of the questions we have about the injuries we don’t meet every day.

Sunday 11th November 2007 08:00hrs – Callout

Occasionally callouts don’t come out of the blue. Last night we received a message to say that there was going to be a callout today. We were to meet at Delamere Forrest car park at 8am. This usually means a full day of searching. After an hour of searching the kitchen, all I had managed to come up with was a semi-stale ham sandwich. It was too late for shopping, so this was going to be a hungry day. At 7:10 there was a knock on my door. Vinny had offered to give me a lift as my car had finally blown up two days earlier, so I grabbed my gear and we set off.

We arrived to a busy scene of Police and other Mountain Rescue teams milling around the car park waiting to be tasked.

We signed on and as more people arrived, got together for a briefing. A man had been missing for two days and they believed he was somewhere in the forest. His car had been found in the car park and they had managed to triangulate his mobile to somewhere in this area. The previous day, Buxton team and Cheshire Lowland Search and Rescue along with SARDA (the search dogs) had started searching the area. Today things were to be scaled up and we would attempt to eliminate every area of the forest.

I was put in a team with Pete, Dave and Neil and we were given a large area of woodland and marsh to search. In order to ensure we had covered it all, we lined out with a GPS on each end of the line. The person on the right hand end took a GPS mark and we searched across the area. Once we reached the end on our area, we wheeled round and used the GPS to track back to our original point. By doing this at both ends of the line, we could cover the whole area without leaving any gaps. The only problem with this was that to cover it thoroughly we had to go in a straight line through some of the worst undergrowth I have come across. In places we almost lost each other as it was up to head height.

And that is pretty much how the morning went. We hacked our way through tougher and tougher undergrowth until there was very little of me that hadn’t been ripped by brambles or poked by branches. Occasionally we bumped into another team on the edge of the next area, but for most of the morning all I saw was this (you can just make out Neil somewhere in there).

As we started to get out of the heavy undergrowth and into a clearer area we were treated to a sudden downpour. I kept expecting to hear on the radio that one of the teams had found him, but nothing came, so we kept on searching in the rain.

Eventually we finished our area. We radioed in and were told to return to control for some lunch. I was really hungry, but I only had a moldy sandwich to look forward to. We arrived back at control to find the Salvation Army had turned up with a support van serving hot food. This was just what I needed after hours of bashing through the undergrowth.

Once we had been fed, we were re-tasked with new assignment. We were given a change in personnel and suddenly I found myself in a team with all the tall people. It soon became clear why when we were given the Water Hazard kit. We were off to check the edges of the water areas. This could mean a bit of wading in these marshy areas, so long legs would be an advantage, unluckily for me. This was the first time we have needed to use the new Water Hazard kit, so here we are ready to go out for the first deployment. In case you are wondering, it’s not that I am small; it’s just that the others are really tall!

We searched where we could around the edges of Hatchmere, but there were no clean edges to this lake. We were knee deep in swamp before we got anywhere near the waters edge. Where we could we searched each of the ponds and swamps.

It was slow going and hard work wearing the full the kit, by the time we had completed our areas we had lost the light, so we were recalled to base. There was nothing else we could do. We had cleared all the areas we could in the time we were given. It is never a good feeling not finding the missing person, but you feel the most for his family. All we could tell them was that he wasn’t in the areas we had searched. The police were going to continue the search the next day using the underwater search teams, but we could do no more unless better information on his movements came forward.

More Photos....

Wednesday 14th November 2007 19:30hrs – Training

Tonight’s training is on Scenes of Crime, for when we are searching and come across a potential crime scene. It is about how not to disturb evidence, while checking the casualty. However due to work commitments and being out for half the weekend, I had to give this one a miss.

Saturday 17th November 2007 11:20hrs – Callout

I’m on my way to collect my son from his Saturday morning football training when I receive a text message. “Stand by- Darren”. This could mean a few things. It generally means that another team has requested assistance, but is not sure if we are definitely needed yet. It usually gives us a chance to get ready in case it turns in to a full callout. This was of no use to me today, as my wife was already on her way to drop my daughter at dancing, so I couldn’t leave my son waiting to be collected from football, I would just have to carry on and see what happened.

Twenty minutes later as I was watching my son get his “player of the week” award (note the fatherly pride), my phone started blasting out it’s text message tune. I had been having trouble hearing it as I was driving recently, so I have managed to work out how to turn it to full blast. The down side of this is that it now seems to go off at every quiet moment and I can’t switch it off until I navigate the menu and get to my text message.

So after all the other parents had tutted me for disturbing the celebrations, I found out that we had a full callout in Prestbury, in Cheshire. I collected my muddy son and dropped him off with my wife, then headed home to get ready for the job.

I headed out to the RV, only to get another message on route with a stand-down. Apparently Neale had arrived on site to find out that we had been requested to search for a missing elderly lady. As he had arrived the police search team had found her body. A sad end to this callout, but at least there was closure to this one, rather than the “nothing found” of our last one.

I headed home to carry on my afternoon of re-cabling our base with Paul. An afternoon that ended up with me crawling under the desks and drilling large holes in the woodwork.

Sunday 25th November 2007 08:00hrs – Joint Exercise with Buxton Team

We had been warned that today’s exercise might start a bit earlier than normal, however when my phone started blaring its text message music to me at 8am I was nowhere near ready. The weather had taken a colder turn over the last few days and there was the start of snow on the tops. The RV for this exercise was in the Goyt Valley, which probably wouldn’t be as cold as the top of Kinder. I packed my rucksack with my winter gear and also a new toy I was trialing, a Bluetooth GPS linked to my mobile phone, showing scrolling maps of the area we were searching.

I turned up at the car park in the Goyt Valley, where quite a few of our team, along with most of Buxton team had already arrived.

The point of this exercise was to practice coordinating the search using two teams and as Bob has recently taken over as a controller, he was responsible for dividing up the search areas. The scenario was that a man had been missing overnight. He was well equipped and we had been given a list of his favorite local routes to work with. Buxton had been called first as this was in their area, and Bob had already dispatched several of their search teams.

I was put in a team with Pete, Lofty and Steve and we were given a route to search over the moorland.

We struggled up on to the tops through a route which clearly no one had walked on in the past few months, but these routes all need clearing. As we fought our way through the thick heather, we had to be careful of the hidden pot holes. With the weight of our rucksacks, if you go down one of these, you could easily break your leg.

After an endless trudge across the tops, we came out on the other side. Pete made an excellent management decision and told us to stop for a brew. While we were having our break, we picked up a broken message saying that someone had found the casualty. We checked in for instructions and were told to hold our position until they decided what they wanted us to do. We filled our time with the only productive thing we could do…eating! Anyway, this could be our last chance to eat for some time.

We waited and waited. It was noticeably colder than it had been recently and it wasn’t long before my down jacket had its first outing of the year. We seemed to be waiting for ages. I had almost finished all of my food! Then we finally got instructions that we were to be retasked to go to the casualty site and a Land Rover was on its way to collect us.

Not only did I have to take off my nice warm down jacket, but I was also bundled in to the back of the Land Rover under a large pile of rucksacks as we were redeployed on the other size of the valley.

We were sent out across another muddy moorland to rendezvous with the team who had found the casualty. Fortunately we were too late to carry the heavy gear. The GPS mapping on my phone came in to its own here. It was showing us exactly where we were on the paper map, saving Steve the time in calculating our position manually.

We soon caught up the other teams, who by now had the casualty on the stretcher and were making their way off. As soon as we caught them up, we were warmly welcomed by getting a turn carrying the stretcher.

Another hour of squelching through the mud and we were back at the Land Rover. There was a lot of packing away and ferrying people down to the road, but soon we were all back at control.

An early finish and a nice warm pub brought me slowly back to life. Anyway, here is some video of the carry off.

And here are some more photos of the day - More Photos....

Wednesday 28th November 2007 20:00hrs - Standby

We received a text message tonight advising us that there had been reports of a sheep stuck on a ledge near the top of Kinder. While it was in no immediate danger, there had already been a failed attempt to recover it by a member of the public. Sheep rescues are not too common, and apparently after the last one we did, the animal was taken to slaughter the next day. The problem was if we left it there too long, it would probably end up causing an accident as more members of the public attempted to rescue it. So a plan was put together to rescue it first thing on Saturday morning, before it got too busy. This text was just to warn us and ask for volunteers.

Friday 30th November 2007 20:00 hrs - Team Meeting

Last Friday of the month is team meeting night. The meeting starts at 20:00hrs, however at 18:00hrs I was just getting out of a meeting in Central London and about to drive home. There was no way I was going to make this one.

When I eventually got home, I checked my e-mails and found out that there had been a development in the "Stuck Sheep" saga. Colin and Nigel had been up to check it's condition and find out how easy it would be to recover it.

They decided that it was safe to attempt a recovery and with the use of a walking pole and a sling, they managed to lasso it's horns and pull it back to safety. The only casualty of the day was Nigel's walking pole, which was bent beyond use.