Last nights Wednesday evening weekly exercise was organised by our Equipment Officer – Water, Dave Cook, and gave those involved at the ‘exercise’ casualty site a problem we do not normally encounter.
The exercise commenced within the car park of Dunscar Golf Club in the Longworth Clough valley, with team members assembling for our usual exercise 20.00hrs start.
Our Team Leader Garry Rhodes MBE was presented with the scenario of a missing 35 year old male walker, between the moorland village of Belmont and Dunscar Golf Course.
A search plan was quickly formulated within our Incident Control vehicle, and over the next 45 minutes four search parties were despatched in to the Longworth Clough valley area, under the radio control of long serving team member Chris Tennant.
At 21.11hrs the exercise casualty was located with serious hip and leg injuries, having suffered a fall …. all ok so far, but then our finders quickly found out Dave Cook had put a twist in to proceedings.
The exercise casualty was played by Rasti Schweizer, a work colleague of Dave’s, who just to make life a little more difficult for our members involved, and for the purposes of the exercise, conversed with his rescuers only in his native Slovak.
All our Trauma Care rucksacks carry a Casualty Care foreign language NHS standard Ambulance issue translation guide, and we also in a genuine emergency can use the translation services available through Fire, Police and Ambulance Control Rooms.
However on this exercise it was Google foreign language translation that came to our members assistance, and Rasti was quickly treated for his ‘injuries’ and stretcher evacuated out of Longworth Clough towards the vicinity of Belmont Paper Works complex.
A later than normal finish at 23.00hrs followed our usual ‘hot debrief’ session.
In total twenty four team Call Out list members were directly involved in this exercise, which also involved all four of our Land Rover Mountain Rescue Ambulances despatching the various search parties, and then the necessary casualty care and evacuation equipment.
We would like to extend our thanks to Rasti Schweizer for his assistance on this exercise, and the management of Dunscar Golf Club for allowing us to use their Club car park for the duration of this exercise.
