Incident 11/2013

At the conclusion of the below exercise, with the majority of team members who had taken part involved back at our Ladybridge Hall Base / HQ or en route back, the team was paged at 15.38hrs by Greater Manchester Police to render assistance in the developing search for a missing 31 years old woman in circumstances giving the Police cause for concern regards her well being.

Our Team Leader Garry Rhodes MBE gathered the initial information from GMP and liaised with the Officer in Charge, and then sent out at 15.41hrs a full team call out page for all team members to RVP initially at our Ladybridge Hall Base / HQ.

With Police investigations gathering momentum, Police patrols were mounted in the area between Halliwell, Bolton and Rivington, with the aim of trying to locate the missing woman.

Thirty two Bolton MRT team call out list members, and five of our Probationary team members, responded to the call out, and soon team members in a variety of their private vehicles, and all four of our Team Land Rover Mountain Rescue Ambulance Vehicles were committed to a search of all likely road routes the missing person may have taken, between the Halliwell area where she was reported missing from and the Rivington area, where she was believed to have been heading to.

The teams part in the search operation was extended then to include searches of some specific areas, including the Wilton Quarry complex and parts of Lever Park, Rivington.

Our specialist SARDA Trail Dog Boris was deployed with his handler Steve Nelson (Fresh from their afternoons practice session, see below report) with Bolton MRT and former SARDA Dog Handler Dave Marsh acting as his navigator.

They followed a scent trail from the ‘place last seen’ of the missing woman, which gave some initial indication of a ‘direction of travel.’

The teams part in this search was co-ordinated from our Ladybridge Hall Base / HQ (With thanks to our colleagues in Bowland Pennine MRT for allowing us to utilise their radio repeater on Winter Hill, which made our radio communications considerably easier to conduct) by a very experienced Bolton MRT search management team, including team member Ken Oakes (A now retired former GMP Missing Person Search Manager) our Training Officer Elaine Gilliland, Paul Brain dealing with the mapping and search plotting aspects and Diane Blakeley very ably keeping pace with all the search administration.

With the initial search phase nearing completion, and whilst in contact with GMP Officers regarding search options for continuing the search, the good news was received that the missing woman had returned to her home address, and at 17.55hrs a full team stand down was paged out to all team members.