Well Incident 13 of 2009 appropriately happened on a Friday, but thankfully it resulted in a very happy outcome.

At 19.00hrs this cold winters evening our Team Leader Garry Rhodes was directly contacted by a GMP Missing Person Search Manager regarding the teams immediate help in a Police search operation rapidly gaining momentum for a missing 7 year old male child in the Little Hulton area of Worsley. A full team pager call out was made at 19.08hrs, with members being asked to respond urgently to this search given the age of the child and the cold weather of this evening.
Our Team Leader, who lives near to the area where the child had last been seen – the childs home address, was able to respond very quickly to the Madams Wood Estate area of Little Hulton, arriving on scene at the search RVP, to liaise immediately with the first arriving Police Officers.

By 19.25hrs the GMP Air Support Unit helicopter, India 99, was overhead, commencing a search of the large areas of open land surrounding the Madams Wood Estate.

Just after 19.30hrs GMP received a report that the missing child had been located at a friends house, unaware of the mounting search operation, and with confirmation of this fact, a stand down to team members responding was paged at 19.40hrs.

At this stage, a large number of GMP Divisional Officers from Little Hulton and Swinton Police Stations were on scene, The GMP ASU was overhead, with a GMP Dog team en route along with a GMP Tactical Aid Unit team and two GMP Missing Person Search Managers.

In total 3x Bolton MRT members had arrived on scene by the time of the pager stand down with an additional 27x team members stood down responding to the search RVP, the team had mobilised all four of our vehicles, our Control, Command & Communications trailer, our Catering trailer and our Aire Shelter tent and its trailer.

Special mention and thanks are appropriate here to the large number of local residents who were offering their help in finding this ’missing’ boy, and to all the local teenagers on their bikes on the estate who were reporting in to the Police that they had searched the local streets.