This evenings training was designed to recreate the incident which the team attended on the north slopes of Winter Hill on Sunday 18th October 2015 (Incident 78).
The exercise was planned by Deputy Team Leader Chris Greenhalgh, Training Officer Alistair Greenough and Medical Officer Mark Scott all who were at this incident. The idea was to run the scenario as a real incident with the team having no knowledge of the venue, all details would be paged out as they would on a real incident. The idea was for Chris to send the pager messages and observe the timings to compare them with the actual incident, Alistair would observe the actions taken at the control point and Mark would observe actions taken at the casualty site.
Chris sourced our exercise casualty who was ex team member Carly Raines and Alistair invited two guests Chris and Paul (both who are interested in joining the team) along to act as members of public and to observe and assist with the exercise in any way they could.
The planned start time was slightly delayed by Incident 81 (see website report), luckily the quick successful outcome of this incident meant the exercise could still go ahead. With poor visibility on the top of Winter Hill due to low cloud and a cold wind the exercise started.
At 19.46 the callout message was sent with brief details of the incident, an RV point and a request for drivers. The first team member on scene was Steve James who was met by our guest Chris (acting as a friend of the casualty) and was guided down to the casualty location. The first team vehicle on scene BM1 with a crew of 5 team members arrived next. With requests from Steve arriving for kit and personnel, this was dispatched quickly and a control point was set up BY team member Nigel Booth using BM1.
As more team members arrived, the required equipment and lighting was taken down to the casualty site, the casualty was treated for her injuries, splinted accordingly and placed on a vacuum mattress. This in turn was placed on a SAR Alpine Light stretcher and a rope haul was set up meaning the stretcher could be raised up the steed slope safely.
The stretcher was then carried approximately 200m back to control arriving there at 21.20. All kit was then retrieved and a debrief was carried out before the team retreated to the Jolly Crofters Public house for a well earned drink.
Twenty one team members took part in this exercise which went very well, the team would like to thank Carly Raines for acting as our casualty and Chris and Paul for their parts in the exercise.
