This evening our usual Wednesday evening weekly training exercise had been cancelled in favour of yesterday evening’s exercise with Cheshire LSART, so the entire Bolton MRT membership was looking forward to a quiet and cosy night in. Well, as is the nature of these things, it didn’t work out like that, when at 21:25 our Team Leader Garry Rhodes was contacted direct by NWAS (Greater Manchester locality) Paramedic Emergency Control to seek advice as to the whereabouts of an incident which was the subject of a 999 call.

Our Team Leader was able to quickly inform NWAS Control of the nearest road(s) to the incident location which was reported to be in Wilton 1 quarry, within the complex of the four Wilton quarries just north of Bolton.

The report of an injured climber who had fallen 10 feet, and was somewhere in the quarry area led to a full callout being paged at 21:32. 22 team members were responding when news came in that our services were not required as the 41 year old male climber had been assisted out of the quarry by his colleagues and had met the responding NWAS ambulance. A full team stand down was paged at 21:43, with two team members already being on scene at this time.

It is not unusual to receive callouts on our Wednesday evening training night (even when we get the day off. This is our 10th call this year which has involved us in search & rescue on a Wednesday evening.