This was the evening of the Grayrigg rail incident on the outskirts of Kendal, in South Cumbria, which prompted a major incident response by all the relevant emergency services in Cumbria.

As part of the overall response to thia major incident, NWAS (Lancashire Area) despatched a number of their vehicles to the Grayrigg incident to support their NWAS (Cumbria) colleagues.

As a result of this ambulance mobilisation into Cumbria by Lancashire, NWAS (Greater Manchester Area) sent some of their vehicles to cover in turn for the Lancashire vehicles, in Lancashire, which had been sent into Cumbria.

There was a possibility that in turn this would have an effect on ambulance cover in NWAS (Greater Manchester Area), so as a direct consequence NWAS (GMA) requested the team provide vehicles to assist them in case their resources could not meet the demands of what is always a busy Friday night/early Saturday morning.

A full team pager call at 22:27 resulted in 15 members responding to our Ladybridge Hall base, enabling us to crew our 4 vehicles, our Control function, and have a luxury of some reserve personnel immediately on hand.

Over the course of the evening, the team responded to 6 emergencies for NWAS (GMA) with our operation being stood down at 03:45.