Serve On humanitarian volunteers will this week fly to central Europe to respond to an imagined earthquake in the Balkans as part of a final assessment exercise for would-be search and rescue responders from across the UK.

The exercise is the culmination of two years of training for the latest candidates to join the Wiltshire charity’s International Response Team and they have been given the opportunity to show off their skills at the world-class SAR International Training Centre in Kosovo.

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Passing their final assessment would show that the volunteers, trained to the UN’s INSARAG standards, are deemed ‘operational’ and ready to be deployed to future disasters.

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From the moment the ten candidates arrive at Serve On’s HQ at Chilmark at lunchtime on Thursday, alerted to ‘a disaster’ where their help is needed, they will be required to act as if the earthquake is real, gathering information, preparing rescue equipment and their own personal kit, and dashing to an airport to deploy to the ‘disaster area’.

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The gruelling exercise will continue in Kosovo where, at the SAR International Training Centre, they will find a vast range of collapsed buildings, crushed vehicles, mass casualties, trapped victims and realistic scenarios to truly test their mettle.

As in a real deployment, the candidates can expect to be carrying out rescue tasks morning, noon and night, grabbing meagre amounts of food, drink and sleep when they can, as they carry out their ‘life-saving’ work for an exhausting five days.

There will be little rest, either, for existing operational volunteers and support team members who will be in Kosovo continually creating the scenarios and providing safety cover, or monitoring and feeding information to the response team 24/7 from the Serve On Operations Room in Wiltshire, as they would do in a real disaster deployment.

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Our candidates undergoing assessment are from London, Salisbury, Tonbridge, Portsmouth, Hemel Hempstead, Chipping Norton, Northampton, Bath, Saxmundham and Manchester.

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They include a financial adviser, a firefighter, a civil engineering student, a highways analyst, a paramedic, a police officer, a Coastguard technologist, a gas engineer, a National Grid project manager and a bomb disposal technician.

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