Snowdon on a good day!
Well the summer holidays started at the weekend, and after having a particularly quiet time in terms of rescues. The last couple of days have really been busy. Although I was working on Tuesday so I didn’t get out, I did get woken along with the rest of Llanberis when both the RAF and Police Helicopters started searching the immediate area for a despondent man.
After searching from 7am to 11pm the search was called off, with most of the team exhausted from a day searching, when the pagers went off on the Wednesday on the first couple of jobs there was only three people present. Only when the third job went off at around 5pm did a few more people turn up.
By all accounts the Weather was a potential factor in all the rescues where strong gust winds seemed to have blown a few people over, one down a fairly serious drop. It does always surprise me that people seem to ignore weather forecast, and think to hell with it, the summit is all that counts and bugger the blood.
Now I have one observation from the job, not of what makes a casualty, but what happens when the helicopter turns up to lift a casualty. Now given that the rescue teams are meant to have a ‘what goes on tour stays on tour’ approach to rescues, it is absolutely amazing that given the presence of a flying machine every single camera or phone comes out and films and photos the scene.
If you know the right social networking sites or YouTube the right key words you’ll probably already be able to see the impressive flying.