Incident 70/2008

At 20:50 this evening, NWAS (Greater Manchester Area) contacted the team to assist with an incident in the Seven Acres Country Park area of Thicketford Brow, Bolton.

A total of 23 call out list members responded to this incident (with 2 additional members stood down responding).

Coincidently one of our members, Ged Clarke, was passing the parked up ambulance at the 20:50 initial pager call to the team (which did not include any incident site locations or RVP). He correctly anticipated this was the incident the team was being paged to and by the time of the full team pager message at 21:00 including the location and RVP, Ged was making contact with the ambulance crew called to this incident.

A 39 year old female walker in a larger party of 9 walkers, all from the Friends of Seven Acres Group, had been checking some flowers and trees in the area as part of an evening walk and slipped on the steep bank of Bradshaw Brook sustaining a fracture/dislocation of her left ankle.

The team working alongside the emergency ambulance crew from NWAS (Bolton South ambulance station) splinted the womans ankle injury in a vacuum splint and carried her on a Troll Alphin mountain rescue stretcher from the river side across fields to the waiting ambulance on Thicketford Road.

The woman reached the ambulance at 21:41 which departed shortly afterwards for Roayl Bolton Hospital.

Two team members in our BM3 vehicle subsequently went to hospital to recover team kit items.

A totally undesirable feature of this easy rescue was the attacking hordes of midges which plagued the ambulance crew and MRT members but somehow ignored the casualty!