Next Sunday, 31st January 2016, the Bolton MRT has been invited to attend a major exercise being hosted and organised by our colleagues at Cheshire Search and Rescue Team.

Both our teams regularly work together on exercise and training courses, alongside mutually aiding each other on operational incidents, usually though not exclusively search operations.

All we know from the exercise briefing issued so far is that the exercise will have a strong search element, and will be focused on the Delamere Forest area of Cheshire.

So far at this stage we have twenty four of our operational members committed to this exercise, alongside two of our Support Group membership – Dave Rees and John Ryan.

We have been requested to lend our Catering Trailer to the exercise, which will also entail the involvement of our DVSD Search Dog Team and Air Scenting Search Dog Team.

We are also committing three of our Land Rovers, our Minibus and our Incident Control vehicle to this day, with one of our four Land Rovers remaining in our team area, to maintain team area rescue cover, with team members who cannot attend the exercise.

Besides circa 40 members from Cheshire SART attending, so far there is also a strong presence from Kinder MRT (over 20x members attending) Staffordshire SART (circa 18x) Merseyside LSART (circa 20x) Bolton MRT (26x) Cheshire Constabulary (circa 30x) Rossendale and Pendle MRT (circa 17x) with NEWSART and Buxton MRT also on the invitation to attend list.

A report on our involvement in this exercise will of course be published here soonest thereafter.