On Monday 19th January 2009, the Greater Manchester area and parts of South Lancashire suffered heavy yet localised snowfalls, prompting the MRTs of Oldham, Rossendale and Pendle, and ourselves to prepare for possible call outs to assist the North West Ambulance Service, as is usually the case whenever it snows !
At 14.09hrs we were paged to contact NWAS (Lancashire) to discuss the teams availability of four wheel drive ambulances given the heavy snowfalls starting to occur in the Darwen area. Our colleagues at Rossendale and Pendle MRT were similarly contacted regards the snow falling in the Rossendale and Rawtenstall areas.As these were only precautionary calls from NWAS (Lancashire) neither ourselves nor RPMRT mobilised.
As the evening progressed NWAS (Greater Manchester) contacted our Team Leader direct to discuss the teams availability, along with similar calls to that of RPMRT and Oldham MRT. As it was only Oldham MRT actually deployed this evening, searching snowbound roads in their peakland team area. Nevertheless our Team Leader and Deputy Leader had to make plans in case the team was called, as did the Leader of RPMRT, and remain in contact with NWAS (Lancashire and Greater Manchester) Control Centres.
In the early hours of Wednesday 21st January we were paged at 01.09hrs by NWAS (Greater Manchester) regards the report of a man in difficulty on the moors above Rochdale. As this is RPMRTs operational area the call was passed on to RPMRT immediately with our Team Leader then in liaison with the Team Leadrer of RPMRT in case any assistance was required from our team to RPMRT as the circumstances of the call indicated a search may be necessary. It was soon determined that our team was not required and at 01.30hrs our team members were paged to stand down. For a full account of this incident refer to the website of RPMRT via our ’links’ section, and view their Incident Nr 5/2009
On Thursday 22nd January we were paged by Greater Manchester Police at 12.42hrs, regards the teams early notification of possibly being required to search the Moses Gate Country Park area of Farnworth, for a missing ’high risk’ missing person. The team was placed on standby by pager, as GMP continued their enquiries throughout the early afternoon. Within a couple of hours Police investigations had resulted in the downgrading of the ’at risk’ catagory of this missing person, and the teams services were no longer required, with a stand down being paged at 14.08hrs.
All of the above involved our Team Leader and Deputy Leader in various planning matters, yet did not ultimately lead to a full team call out, and all are described above to record the activity level of the team, despite none of these calls being recorded in our Incident listings.
