When the training pays off…
Callouts for the Borders mountain rescue team come in many shapes and sizes. We have river-bank searches and woodland searches; we have urban callouts for vulnerable missing persons and we have long protracted operations in the hills. Within our patch we have the windswept and beautiful moorland of the Lammermuirs and the plump Cheviots, riven by lovely glens and sheltered valleys. What we don’t really have to any great extent is cliffs and very steep, rocky ground. However, just in case, we train regularly for a scenario where someone comes to grief on this kind of terrain.
On the last weekend in April we had a training exercise based in the gorgeous woodland at the bottom end of the River Leader, just south of Earlston. Here, the Leader wends it way through a fairly narrow gorge with near-verticle ground rising about 50m on one side, and a more gentle slope on the other. It was an excellent day’s training, with a lot of very valuable learning for the newer members, and refreshing of skills for the more experienced. There’s always a good deal of healthy discussion around how best to organise the rope systems and tailor them to each particular scenario, and this exercise was no different.
On May 16th, just as I was starting to start ruminate on this month’s Kelso Life article, a callout came in. Northumberland MRT had been called to Norham Castle, where an 80-year-old woman had fallen 20m down a very, very steep slope on the south bank of the Tweed, and come to rest, injured, lodged against a wind-blown tree halfway down. Northumberland were a bit low on numbers, and called BSARU to lend some manpower.
The casualty’s position was pretty precarious, and remarkably similar to that which we’d rehearsed just a fortnight earlier by Leaderfoot, and the resulting stretcher-lower down to the river-bank used the same techniques, skills and equipment, providing security to casualty, MR volunteers and ambulance paramedics in a hazardous situation. Once down at river level, the stretcher was loaded onto a boat crewed by the Borders Water Rescue Team - assisted by the Fire Service, and taken to a more accessible area. Here, the lady was reassessed by the ambulance crew, transferred to an ambulance and transported to hospital for further treatment.
Last month I described the invaluable work that search dogs do for us, and congratulated BSARU member Rob Hume and his trusty collie Cairn on their recent qualification. Just a few weeks later, Rob and Cairn were called upon to help Penrith Mountain Rescue Team with a search in Cumbria. Receiving the call from a Lake District team is a big fillip for them both, and Rob’s tail will have been wagging 19 to the dozen!
