This October, when the rivers were full of Swaledale rain, we held one of our water CPD events.  Swaledale MRT hosted & North of Tyne & Cleveland MRTs brought extra water techs (MOD 3).

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This gave us a good 25 in water technicians plus team leaders.

We’ve recently started looking at a more joined-up approach to our water (and other areas) training.

Historically, we used to train each discipline independently, water, rope, medical search etc.  However, we’ve concluded that we need to train these elements together to replicate what happens when we’re on a real job.

So now we train to search both in water and bank side, water rescue, medical treatment in water and finally water to rope evacuation, throw a bit of comms into the mix and it makes for a great solid training session.

 

The exercise brief was that a group of canoeists had capsized due to high water levels & reports of multiple people in the water were passed to the team.

It was quickly established that 3 of the group were outstanding, followed by reports of a body seen in the water.

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As this was a multi-agency job, we had Victim Recovery (Cadaver) Search Dogs from Search + Detection Dogs, on hand for the search phase. 

Search managers deployed the dogs to search both sides of the river & the water rescue teams deployed the dogs across the water.

Once deployed, they quickly had indications of bodies in the water & the water teams were able to then locate and recover the casualties.

Once on the rescue sleds, the casualties were floated down stream to meet the rope section who had a pre rigged system ready for the interface from water to crag.

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A great day’s training with multi agencies and multiple skills sets all working closely and ultimately giving a fantastic SAR capability.