The weekend in which we move our clocks back an hour means it is once again time for the annual Moffat Mountain Rescue Team Joint Exercise and the event this year will be held over Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th October 2014. The exercise involves the regions two mountain rescue teams, the Moffat and the Galloway MRTs, and this year they will be joined by members of the Police Scotland MRT, formerly the legacy Strathclyde Police team as well as a contingent from the neighbouring Borders area. The exercise will be held in the hills around Moffat and will be coordinated from the Moffat MRT base in the town.
These exercises allow the teams to work with each other, learning and developing search and rescue techniques from each other in testing circumstances. Working with Search Management officers from Police Scotland, the teams are given scenarios relating to lost or missing people, and thereafter they come up with search strategies and plans to locate and rescue them. The exercise is given an extra degree of realism with the involvement of the Search and Rescue helicopter from RN Gannet who will attend and train alongside their MRT colleagues over the two days.
Colin Golphin, Team leader for the Moffat MRT says “the teams are really tested on these exercises and put through their paces in relation to search and rescue techniques. The exercises can be designed to test either the search aspect to a situation, or the rescue aspect, once a casualty has been located, and we make sure that everyone is kept involved as far as is possible. Whilst these exercises are carefully planned, the one thing we cannot factor in is the weather, and whilst we have had some fine days in the past, we have also had some fairly horrendous weather conditions to cope with. But it all adds to the realism of the exercise.”
