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After a rigorous selection exercise to find candidates with the right temperament and resilience, humanitarian charity Serve On recently sent 10 candidates to an arduous exercise involving a mock earthquake near Pristina to see if they were ready for deployment when disaster really does strike.
Highly-trained, dedicated volunteers are the life-blood of Serve On’s International Response Team (IRT), ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice to deploy to disasters around the world. After two years of recruit training, the five-day final assessment exercise is intended to be as realistic as possible and this year used world-class facilities at the Search and Rescue International Training Center in Kosovo.
The ten candidates from across the UK honed their USAR techniques, rope work, water rescue and other key skills over many months in preparation for the Kosovo exercise.
Deployment process
The candidates arrived at Serve On’s HQ in Chilmark, Wiltshire, where they were faced with the usual pre-deployment challenges of urgently trying to gather information on the ‘disaster’ and notionally seeking official permission to respond, all the while checking and packing the rescue equipment they would need.
Cleared to deploy, they headed to the airport for flights that landed them in Kosovo late on a Friday night to be greeted by local Kosovan military volunteers manning a UN-style ‘Reception Departure Center.’
No sooner had they negotiated the paperwork of the RDC and set up their Base of Operations (BoO) than they were tasked with rescuing a casualty from a crashed vehicle, first having to remove a large slab of concrete and stabilise the shattered bridge on which the car was trapped.
Relentless activity
It was the start of 64 hours of almost non-stop rescue activity for two teams of five candidates. Each team is guided by a team leader from among Serve On’s existing operational IRT members and supported by nearly two dozen other charity volunteers. These had also travelled to Kosovo or were back in the UK; they set up scenarios, provided safety cover and casualty role players and gave the sort of 24/7 operational support they would in a real deployment.
As dawn broke on the Saturday, the candidates were carrying out technical searches, seeking signs of life under rubble piles with their seismic listening equipment, then breaking and breaching their way into furniture-strewn voids under the rubble to reach two casualties.
The extensive grounds and variety of ‘collapsed’ buildings and ‘disaster’ scenes provided by the SAR International Training Center, and the invaluable support of local staff and Kosovo Security Force volunteers, provided ideal realism to really test the mettle of the candidates.
At 0200 on Sunday morning candidates were tasked with rescuing a bariatric casualty and others trapped in cars in a tunnel buried by rubble and at 0500 they were rescuing three casualties from a secondary collapse, breaking and breaching their way to reach into voids and under a pancake collapse.
The afternoon saw more rescues from a ‘collapsed’ multi-storey building but there was little time for rest as, at 0200 on Monday, the teams were called to a ‘mass casualty’ event at a train derailment – another example of the remarkable scenarios the Training Center is able to provide.
At 0700 candidates were carrying out a stepped vertical breach through reinforced concrete to reach ‘casualties’ trapped beneath them in a multi-storey building ‘collapse’.
Even as they prepared to strike their BoO and clean their rescue kit before heading to the airport, the candidates were tasked to another rescue with a gruelling stretcher carry back to their camp.
The outcome
The candidates all acquitted themselves well and, in addition to testing their readiness, the assessment exercise was a perfect opportunity for the charity to fine-tune its deployment logistics and communication equipment.
Nine of the ten candidates, who have trained as USAR technicians, passed their assessment to become operational. The tenth, a paramedic, proved she is ready to be deployed in future in a medic role within the team.
“The final assessment event is an enormous step for recruits at Serve On and takes them into the deployable operations pool, which is the culmination, in many cases, of years of work.
“We are really pleased with how the extra levels of support we have incorporated into our training have helped them during the many challenges – in terms of managing themselves and each other and in terms of understanding the importance of internal relationships under pressure and decision-making under pressure – as well as all of the technical skills they have been studying.
“We are really proud of them; really proud of the deployed staff and command support; and really proud of everybody who has helped to make this happen, and as much as we don’t want these disasters to happen, when they do we are looking forward to that extra boost we will get from having these new operational members by our side.”
Dan Cooke, Serve On Operations Director.
The teams were backed up throughout by their command support team using SarStuff’s SARSYS and Teamsite (@sarstuff.co.uk), the Safe Citizen app (@SafeCitizens) and Zello (@Zello) for situational awareness, risk management, coordination and communication.
The candidates also applied learnings from the Human Performance work of Professor Andy McCann and the Dark Swan development programmes (@dnadefinitive & @darkswanUK) for areas including stress management, sleep optimisation, inner dialogue, circuit breakers and belonging.
Serve On International Response Team volunteers have been deploying to global disasters for more than 25 years. With a UK Ops team and a dog team offering flood response and help to blue light services in searches and crisis situations in the UK, plus a Rescue Rookies programme to mentor 14-17-year-olds, the charity aims to help those in need whenever it can.
Its volunteers come from all over the country and from all walks of life – from military veterans, to emergency services personnel, business leaders, teachers, nurses, students and tradespeople – and being part of the charity gives them a valuable new purpose, whether as part of rescue teams or in equally valuable support roles.
