Alan’s Diary – Exercise 23.5.10
Mike - Crashed at the bottom of a crag
Sunday exercise seemed to come round quickly this month. We turned up at the hut on the hottest day of the year, trying to second guess where the exercise would be held. We aren’t allowed to hold exercises on the top of Kinder in the summer months, as there is a program going on to protect nesting birds on the plateau. If it’s an emergency, there’s no problem with access, but the National Trust ask us not to tramp around on the tops during the summer months….which is fair enough, I suppose. My bet was on a search of Ollerset moor, as this wasn’t one of the mandatory sessions, such as Helicopters, or Rope Rescue, so a search was most likely.
At the hut, we were given the scenario. A climber had called in to say that his partner had taken a fall and was at the bottom of a crag on….you’ve guessed it….Ollerset Moor! I win the “where will the exercise be” prize, or would if there was one! There weren’t many of us at the exercise today, so we were split in to two teams to search the crags from both ends. We were dispatched to the far end to begin our search from there.
The first of may Cas Sites for the day
It didn’t take too long to find the fallen climber, and they had done a good job of setting up the Casualty site, with ropes still attached to the rock and a couple of fallen climbers scattered at the bottom of the rock. I started to set up the site, with a Cas Carer and assistant at the casualties, a runner operating between control and the casualties and a radio operator to make contact with our link station to get messages back to base. However I obviously hadn’t read the script for today. Just as I was starting to feel good about the setup of my Cas site, we noticed another fallen climber around the corner. A re-think was needed. I sent in Sarah, who had been acting as runner, to investigate this casualty, only for her to tell me there was a further casualty near by. The penny finally dropped. This was supposed to be a triage exercise. I went back to first principles and asked the four people now carrying out Casualty care to carry out a primary survey and come back to me with how seriously injured each of the casualties was , so that we could decide how quickly each of them needed to be evacuated.
At this point the second team turned up, so as this was an exercise, we decided to reset everything and let them have a go at the triage. Once they had finished their go, we went back to the original plan and carried on with the evacuation. As we had four casualties, one of which was seriously injured, we requested air support to fly them out. This request was predictably turned down, as was our request for support for an additional team’s help. Base did manage to send out a text to the team asking for more of the team to help. It got the response we expected….nothing! So this left us with four casualties and eight spare people to carry a stretcher. We had a good survey of the area and realised that we could get a Land Rover a lot closer than we first though. We picked a point we could get the Land Rover to, which became our target for carry the stretcher to. We packaged mike in the Vacuum mattress and stretchered him down to the Land Rover drop off point. It was then back up the hill and on to the next one. Finally after stretchering two of the casualties down the hill, a “paper” helicopter became available. This means that one would have been available, but we didn’t actually have a real one arrive!
Carring the stretcher down to the pickup point
Casualties gone, we wrapped up and made our way back to base, to replace some of the fluids lost on this hot day!
