Incident 123/2006

Just occasionally a callout comes along that’s just a little too co-incidental!

On Sunday 15th October the team is taking part in a joint exercise with Bolton Fire station crews from Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, possibly alongside some of our colleagues from Oldham MRT, in an exercise based on a tower crane in Bolton, with the scenario requiring the rescue from height of two persons, jointly working with GMFRS.

As such the team has been organising some specialist training in this respect, with a training session due for Sunday 8th October amongst our tower crane ’aware’ members (see website news entry in this respect for September 2004)
We’ve also been experiencing some recent problems with our pager callout and administration/training messages system, not from our end but from the pager bureau end, with some messages apparently ’lost’ and others apparently ’late in being transmitted/received.’

So at circa 03.50 hours this morning the story begins with Oldham MRT’s Team Leader Mick Nield contacting our Team Leader, Garry Rhodes for a joint response to (wait for it)… a tower crane incident in the centre of Manchester involving two persons on the structure, the call being to assist GMFRS resources on scene.
By 03.56 a full team pager call was being transmitted, but some team members, given the time of the call in the wee small hours of the morning initially thought the call was an ’out of time’ message about the tower crane exercise!
Thankfully waking up to the full meaning of the pager message 22 team members started to respond to the incident, some to go on the tower crane with others in support roles etc., all in a joint operation under Oldham MRT assisting GMFRS.
News then came to Oldham MRT from GMFRS that the two persons on the tower crane had now ’self rescued’ themselves, and additional GMFRS resources were being stood down. Oldham MRT in turn contacted our Team Leader and at 04.08 a full team stand down message was paged out.

So it was back to bed for twenty two members….