At 03.09hrs in the early hours of this Easter Monday morning we were paged by Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service to jointly attend with them an incident possibly requiring line rescue access, as part of the PDA (Pre Determined Attendance) agreement GMFRS have with MRTs in Greater Manchester.

The incident involved a male injured underneath a railway bridge on Little Lane, Pemberton, Wigan, requiring evacuation up the railway embankment.

GMP had originally received the emergency call, contacting in turn NWAS (Manchester) who in turn contacted GMFRS for their assistance.

Both our Team Leader Garry Rhodes MBE and Deputy Team Leader Geoff Seddon jointly answered the pager call, and a full team pager call out message was sent at 03.15hrs, by which time the first attending Pump Appliance form GMFRS had already been on scene for some minutes.

At 03.27hrs our Team Leader was contacted directly by GMFRS Swinton Control to stand down the teams response as the GMFRS and NWAS (Manchester) personnel on scene had managed to evacuate the casualty.

A full team pager stand down was made at 03.29hrs, by which time a number of our team members were already at our Bolton Central Fire Station and Ladybridge Hall Base / HQ garages, just about to depart in all four of our Land Rover Mountain Rescue Ambulance vehicles.

In total twenty three Bolton MRT Call Out list members were responding to this incident at stand down, including a number of our members who live in the Wigan area.

Besides the NWAS (Manchester) GMFRS and GMP response to this incident, NWAS (Manchester) EOC Parkway had also mobilised the NWAS Merseyside and Cheshire HART team to this incident.