At 14:12hrs this wintry and increasingly snowy afternoon the team was paged by NWAS (Greater Manchester Area) Control followed two minutes later by NWAS (Lancashire) Control, requesting the team go to ‘crewed vehicle standby’ to assist with any incidents occurring where NWAS needed our assistance due to wintry road conditions.

Similar calls were made to our colleagues at Rossendale and Pendle MRT, Bowland Pennine MRT and Oldham MRT, in both Lancashire and Greater Manchester.

We were requested to put one Land Rover Mountain Rescue Ambulance on standby at Darwen Ambulance Station with four team members, backed up by team member John Fletchers 4WD vehicle and Carly Raines.

Our other three Land Rover Mountain Rescue Ambulances maintained their standby at our Ladybridge Hall Base / HQ.

In total 26x Bolton MRT call out list members were involved in the standby upto 22.00hrs this evening.

We were stood down responding to only a few calls (The public heeding the NWAS media appeals to only call for an ambulance in dire circumstances) including transporting NWAS Emergency Ambulance staff members to Bolton South Ambulance Station.

On his way home from this standby, team call out list member Dave Cook came across an RTC in the Bolton area, which has since been reported in the ‘Bolton News.’

There follows Dave’s account of his involvement in this incident;

“Just to let you know I was involved in an incident on my way home from base tonight at around 19.00hrs.

Obviously I was still in team kit and a lot of photographs were taken by onlookers.

The car in front of me skidded and crashed into “Su’s” chip shop on Belmont Road, Bolton, the entire roller shutter door and housing landing on top of the car. The driver was uninjured but as he was disabled he could not get out of the damaged drivers side door, and could not move across to the passenger side.

Basically I made sure everyone was OK until the Fire and Police arrived. (which included two Fire Appliances from W50 Bolton Central Fire Station)

Apparently the driver then purchased Fish and Chips twice, then went home!”