Mud and water rescue require a special type of response

Search and rescue activities are carried out in many different places, some more unusual than others. The beach at Crosby, just north of Liverpool, is one of those. Home of Another Place, an installation by renowned sculptor Sir Antony Gormley, 100 life-size statues cast in iron from his own body span across 1.5 miles of beach where the River Mersey widens.

It is a beautiful and compelling setting, and for Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, a place where they are regularly called to rescue people who stray too far in search of the statues that in some places are in the water itself.

Station Manager Mike Cotgrave is a training manager at the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service Training and Development Academy. He still attends incidents and recalls a recent rescue a short distance across the Mersey at Wallasey when a warm spell brought the locals out to the beach and two people got stuck in the mud up to their knees.

To rescue them takes two fire appliances from the local station plus the specialist Search and Rescue Team. HM Coastguard also attend and Mike says that they would normally coordinate the response, but they do have a team that can work alongside the fire service.

He talks about ‘mudders’ which are large plastic ‘shoes’ that allow the rescuer to spread their weight across the sodden terrain to reach the victim. Along with a more prosaic shovel, the team can dig out the victim and walk them back to safety or if they have been there a long time, they will be carried out on a stretcher – and in one case at Crosby where the stretcher wasn’t available, the crews used a surfboard instead.

Finding solutions to problems is in the DNA of the fire and rescue service. Watch Manager Lee McCartney talks about the process to find new kit that fits the job. “Our Research and Development Team will look into it and will tell us if some of our neighbouring services have tried a piece of equipment, so we can then test it out ourselves. If it works effectively, we’ll look to roll it out to our stations.”

Much of the mud rescue kit is tried and tested, with inflatable ‘paths’ forming a walkway across muddy beaches, reaching up to five metres to allow the crews to reach victims further away, adding more walkways as they go. The Search and Rescue Team at Aintree Community Fire Station, co-located with the Training and Development Academy, show the walkway in action and how quickly it can be inflated and ready to use. It, like all kit on a fire engine, needs to pack down small as there is a lot to squeeze into the finite space as the photograph below demonstrates.

These are just some of the assets available to the crews and Mike explains that every two years they review the content of the search and rescue training programme to make sure they are always considering the changing risks and providing the optimum response. He’s been doing that work recently with HM Coastguard Area Manager Mike Buratti, who used to work for MFRS so is well versed in the approach. Each fire station must do two exercises per year, putting all that training into practice.

The review of training also incorporates changes to policy and Lee says that they’ve recently revised their water rescue policy based on learning from incidents. He explains:

“Normally, the bells would go down and we would attend a water related incident. Our crews would don their PPE (such as dry suits, flotation devices and so on ) prior to getting on the appliance. Having reviewed this approach from our organisational learning, we were able to identify a means to maximise our response times and still ensure our operational crews were suitably equipped and protected.  

“After a massive review over the past 12 months, now we are sending the first crew to get eyes on that person, to formulate and stabilise the plan, while the second appliance is getting ready. The incident can then be quickly handed over to the rescue team who are equipped and ready to respond.”

During this visit, the team show two recent additions to their search and rescue ‘toolbox.’ First is the water rescue robot called Fasty, a 17kg bright orange device that can be deployed on the water to a victim without having to put a firefighter in the water.

“Most of the water related incidents that we go to don’t require us to commit into the water.” Lee explains.

“The Fasty is a remote-control device made out of tough rigid plastic, originally developed in Turkey for rescues at sea, the lifeguard could send it out so they don’t have to go for a swim and recover the person back. So with that in mind, our crews can turn up, get eyes on and stabilise that incident, rather than putting crews at risk. They can deploy this robot using a remote control, send it over to them, tell them hold on to it and then drive them back to the bank side.”

It’s an example of collaborative thinking from the North West Tactical Subgroup where different services are trying out the Fasty and sharing use and changes that will improve its deployment over time.

The second innovation is about improving how to locate people who are underwater. Lee explains:

“If we turn up to a main body of water, we can only operate on the surface and we can’t see what’s going on underneath. It can take  a  long time to identify where that person might have gone missing. With the new equipment called an AquaEye Lite, we can send a sonar wave through the water.

“It’s got a 180-degree search arc that can be seen on the screen of the handheld device and integral artificial intelligence that will help you identify if there’s potential for a person under the water; it gives us an idea of the shape and tell us if potentially it looks like a person rather than something else under the water.”

It’s a massive time saver, allowing crews to focus rescue efforts more efficiently. Lee adds: “Before using this, it might have taken several hours and used an entirely manual process.”

This visit showed the complexity of the search and rescue equipment used by fire and rescue services. The enthusiasm of the team at MFRS was impressive as was their desire to take a collaborative approach to learn from incidents and take the challenge to the suppliers to find solutions to reduce risk and drive improvements in public safety.

For those who walk on Crosby beach, they can rest assured that if they go too far out to see one of the statues and find themselves stuck, they will be in safe hands.

Read more – Fire Minister visits ‘world-class’ National Resilience capability in Merseyside.