Recently Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service have replaced their hand held portable Thermal Imagery Equipment held on their Fire Appliances with more capable latest generation equipment for the task they are used for.

Some of their now surplus older generation, yet still fully operational Thermal Imagery Equipment is now facing a new future with three mountain rescue teams who serve the Lancashire County area.

In Mountain Rescue use, these very capable hand held units can be of considerable assistance when we are faced with searching dense vegetation and undergrowth, and in other similar circumstances.

Lancashire Fire and Rescue service have very kindly donated two each of the units to our colleagues at Bowland Pennine MRT and Rossendale and Pendle MRT.

This evening we received four of the units, to equip individually all four of our operational Land Rover Mountain Rescue Ambulance vehicles.

Within Bolton MRT we feel these units will enhance and increase our search capabilities, indeed we have direct experience of using such a few years ago on a night time search for a missing person on a densely wooded hillside in Darwen, when we loaned such equipment from LFRS Darwen Fire Station for the duration of the search.

The Bolton MRT would like to extend its thanks to all at Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service for their donation of this valuable equipment to ourselves and our colleague teams.

We would particularly like to personally thank LFRS Officers Taylor and Walton for their involvement in this donation, and Phil O’Brien, Team Leader of Bowland Pennine MRT who helped in the collection and distribution of this equipment to all three receiving MRTs.