Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
Diary - October 2008
Sunday 5th October 2008 09:00hrs - 4x4 Training
It was another early start. We had to meet in a pub car park near Pontefract for 9am. This meant a 7:30 start, which is never a good thing on a Sunday morning. The morning was rescued by Vinney, who talked the pub owner in to making Bacon sandwiches for us.
We met up with the Glenn from Corporate Pursuits, the company providing the training for the day and headed off to their venue. They operate out of a disused quarry, which has plenty of rough ground and steep slopes to practice on. This is the second time I have been on a 4x4 course with Corporate Pursuits and each year we alternate between training Off Road driving and Winch recovery training. Last year I had my Off Road training, so this year it was Winch training for me.
We started with a theory session on equipment, safety and mechanical advantage angles and then went on to different ways to pull a Land Rover out of large holes. We used both the winch on the front of one of the Land Rovers as well as a hand cranked winch known as a Turfer.
After lunch while the other half of our group had their Off Road training, we went on to pull Land Rovers out of deeper and deeper holes. Each time we needed to come up with a more complex method of setting up the winch.
Finally we had a major challenge of winching a stuck vehicle round a corner and back over a steep drop. A technical challenge, which took us a while to complete safely, but we got there in the end.
It was a good training day, so watch out for future diary entries when I will no doubt have to use these skills after I have managed to get the team Land Rover well and truly stuck.
Monday 6th October 2008 12:00hrs – Callout
I was sat at a desk working in Liverpool, when my phone started its text tune. The message was a callout to meet at the hut. I was over an hour away from home, but it’s still usually worth me getting there. I wouldn’t be in the first team out, but if we have to evacuate a casualty from the hill, I could still be needed to either carry gear up, or help with a stretcher carry off.
As it turned out, we received a stand down just before I got there. A 27 yr old male had fallen from his mountain bike at the top of Jacob's Ladder and had a hip injury. An Air Ambulance had been dispatched by Ambulance control.
We sent a party of 4 team members to back up the Air Ambulance just before 12:30pm. They drove to the top of Jacob's Ladder only to be informed by walkers that an Air Ambulance had taken off only 5 minutes before they got there.
In these cases we always go to back up the Air Ambulance, as they can either get called to a higher priority emergency or sometimes they just can’t get through because of the weather. In this case it was back to work for us.
Monday 6th October 2008 19:30hrs – Casualty Care Training
Following the drama of earlier in the day, it was back to the more mundane evening of a Casualty Care training session. Tonight we were having a practical session where we went through several medical scenarios.
It was good to get some hands on training again after a few theory sessions recently. Though some of us seemed to get more hands on than others!
Wednesday 15th October 2008 19:30hrs – Training
Tonight we are doing scenarios. This means an outdoor mini exercise, where we work on medical scenarios. The idea tonight was to make this as realistic as possible. With early nights coming on, we were practicing working in the dark and were put under time pressure to make this feel more like the real thing.
There were four casualties sent out to a local field and we had to rotate round them making sure we ran through our ABC system of diagnosing life threatening injuries, then moving on to a top to toe survey.
This started out to plan, until we received a request from Buxton team to help with the evacuation of a fallen climber.
Darren took a team of six to help out. Apparently the climber had fallen around two hours previously, and was badly injured and very cold. His climbing partner had tried to call for help, but had no cellular coverage, so he had to walk out to a farm to raise the alarm. The team arrived just in time to help carry the man up to the top of the crag as an RAF Sea King arrived to evacuate him to hospital.
Sunday 19th March 2008 09:00hrs – Exercise
Early Sunday morning and we are all waiting for the text message to kick off today’s exercise. I have been up for a while, as our recent exercises have all started by 8am. This one is obviously taking a bit of getting going, or more likely that the person who is going to be the casualty has only just got out of bed and needs a bit of time to get in position. Still I didn’t really mind as I got to watch the Japanese Grand Prix while I was having my breakfast.
Finally the text message arrived. It told us to meet in a pub car park in Rowarth, a small hamlet a few miles from our base. As we arrived, we were briefed on the scenario. A man was reported missing in the area from the previous night. We quickly put four search parties together along with a search dog team and were sent out on our routes.
I was sent out in a team with Pete, Steve and John for a muddy plod up the valley to clear a route to the ridge. We had only been going for about an hour when we heard a radio message saying that the dog team had found the missing casualty. The find was on the other side of the search area, so we started to make our way over.
When we finally got there, the casualty site was at the base of a cliff, above a long steep slope.
The other teams were already ferrying gear from the Land Rover to the casualty site and we made our way down to help with the last of the kit. After carrying the gear up to the casualty site, we arrived to find Vinny as the casualty lying injured in the rocks at the base of the cliff. The plan was to carefully get him from this position down on to the stretcher we had just brought up and then lower him down to the bottom of the slope. While we rigged a belay around some large boulders, the rest of the team managed to extract him using the Vacuum mattress.
We then lowered him down the slope with Dave and myself attached to the bottom of the stretcher to help walk it down.
Once at the bottom, we carried him out to the Land Rover and then all headed back to the pub for a debrief.
Here is a video of the day's events:
Friday 31st October 2008 – Team Meeting
A quiet team meeting tonight. It may have had something
to do with it being half term and Halloween, but there weren’t too
many people attending tonight. The items for discussion went through quickly
and we were introduced
to a couple of new probationary members – good luck to them. Afterwards
Bob, Bernie and Paul had put together a quiz night. You had to have
a good understanding of old mountaineers to have any chance at this one.