I am fairly seriously pissed off at the moment.
Every organisation has its own internal politics – it’s just how life is. Some play power games, some want money, some build empires, and some just want to get on with the job. Politics in voluntary organisations can be particularly bad – it’s not that surprising when you get a bunch of people together who all believe passionately enough in a cause to donate that amount of time and effort. It’s the main reason I stopped my work with the First Responders – between the voluntary side and the involvement with the ambulance service, there was just too much politics. Mountain Rescue in this area has traditionally had some interesting politics, but never let it get in the way of the job.
So when Mountain Rescue politics did kick up last week, it caught me by surprise and annoyed me. More than that, it blindsided Sean. As a result he’s now announced that he’s no longer interested in joining the team, which is a shame – I was really looking forward to working with him on jobs and seeing him do well on the team.
Thing is, it’s got me thinking and has got me pretty angry right now. Do I really want to be part of a wider organisation who can treat people like that? I love the job that we do, I love getting in there and doing the job, and I know that 99% of the people in the organisation are there to do the same as I am – get on with rescuing people. But I find myself questioning my membership over the event. I’m sat here at the moment while there’s a rescue going on a few valleys away thinking about my membership and my commitment and other things – my hayfever, my contribution. Hayfever’s stopped me halway out the door today because I realised that if I wandered up a hill with the pollen this thick, I’d be collapsing in a heap of mucus, sneezes and wheezes before I reached the casualty. No drugs can stop that amount of pollen from affecting me.
So my head’s in a mess with a million different thoughts going through it right now. I’m damn well sure however, that I’m not going to let politics or the team come between Sean and I.
Postscript: I toyed with the thought of posting this for a while. I’m aware that several people will read it and feel like I’m airing the organisations dirty laundry in public. However, I feel strongly that since I started this blog that I would comment on the things that I came across that mattered to me, whether positive or not.
Tags: hayfever, Mountain Rescue, politics, rant, sean
Part of being in Mountain Rescue is the commitment. The commitment to carry a pager with you and respond when you can, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every single day of the year. Even Christmas day.
Wherever I go, the pager goes. It goes on vibrate sometimes, other times it even goes on silent. But it stays on, ready to receive its little message.
At night, it sits next to the front door, where it has reception. It’s piercing tone set to beep continuously until I get to it and hit a button – it’s the only way it will wake me up. It’s very loud, especially in the early hours of the morning.
Three nights ago, it went off and interrupted my sleep. Meh, it happens. I can’t respond during nights this week – I’ve got a big project to finish off at work and sadly, Mountain Rescue doesn’t pay the bills. So, when the pager woke me at 0631 on Tuesday morning, I wordlessly padded downstairs, turned it off, set it to silent – because I knew there’d be more messages – and went back to sleep. It was a search in Carmarthenshire – no way I was going to get there and do anything useful before work.
Wednesday morning, it was about 0145 when it went off. This time, it was followed rapidly by a “555″ message – stand down. Fine, back to sleep, grumbling lightly.
This morning it was 0146 when the initial alert came through. Frustrated and tired, I shut it up and went back to sleep. 0200 the message came through – missing person in Caerphilly, all of a 3 minute drive away. Ten minutes later – stand down.
Can I get a decent night’s sleep tonight please?
Tags: Mountain Rescue, pager, rant, search
On Saturday, Sean is moving in.
Well, OK, he’s lived here over the various University holidays over the past three years, but as of this Saturday, he’s finished his degree. He’s packing up the last of his things and throwing them in the back of his still-new-to-him car and bringing them here.
Am I excited? Am I fuck. I’m bouncing.
There is, however, the small logistical matter of where the hell we’re going to put his crap. Because folks, I have a lot of crap. The office has recently been semi-emptied – that is, we’ve gone through all of the tat in there, put up some shelves, filled the shelves with tat we can’t bear to throw out, thrown out shitloads of tat and shoved the rest in the corner or into the spare room. The other day, you know, that day. The Day Mal Got Married*. Well, he was staying in the spare room given that his bride to be was staying in their place. So, I had to reorganise and it turns out it’s not quite so much of a Tardis as I’ve been treating it.
So, I have a feeling that some general reorganising is going to have to be done in the house when he comes home. But that’s just logistics.
Right now, I’m just looking forward to spending evenings snuggling on the sofa watching Gray’s Anatomy. Or Casualty. Or the Bill. Or something.
* Oh God but this deserves a post of its own, just as soon as I’ve nicked some pictures to illustrate because I, like the idiot best man I was, did not take a single picture all night. Seriously.
Tags: house, Mal, relationships, sean, Senghenydd
It’s cold. I’m just recovering from the flu and still feeling a bit naff, but when the pager goes off I don’t hesitate and jump into my Discovery and plough through the snow. I stop at base and we’re told that the road to the RV is closed to all bar 4×4’s. Both team Landrovers are busy ferrying people, so I offer the use of my Discovery. Emptied of my usual load, four other mountain rescuers jump in with kit piled high in the boot and we’re off, up to the RV. The road is treacherous but we make it fine and we all pile out. Most of the team is here, and other teams have been called in to help as well. I realise I haven’t got my jacket with me and throw on a skiing jacket instead, stomping around in the snow and grabbing a chocolate bar – I still feel a bit rough.
Our quarry is in this valley somewhere. We start searching – it’s already dark and the snow is falling hard. The snowcover makes it worse as it covers the grass between the tussocks and the tops of the tussocks themselves evenly, meaning that with every step you’ve no idea if you’re going to be standing on a tussock or sinking knee deep in snow. For a moment, the snow slows and I get a view of a line of headtorches and search lamps stretching from ridge to ridge, sweeping down through the valley, a line of searchers led by dogs and handlers searching for the two of them.
Two and a half hours in and I’m tired, wet and steaming lightly in the cold. My skiing jacket isn’t coping with the hard tromping we’re doing and I’m overheating inside it. There’s a call over the radio, one of the dogs has a strike. Adrenaline pumps around my body and as one the line stops, instructed by control to hold position. It’s confirmed, the man and woman we’ve been looking for, alive, cold but very happy to see us. We sweep forward and crowd around, our lights turning that small patch of mountain to daylight. A find! Alive!
We turn and start walking them off, grinning, glad that we’ve found them alive.
A message over the radio: The man’s wife has reported him missing as well, but not to worry, the police told her that we’d found him safe and well.
He blanches.
Did they tell her who I was with, he asks.
A sudden realisation hits us and we try to hide our smiles at his misfortune. We shrug and walk them off.
It’s only later, back in base tucking into tepid pie and chips the police provided that we hear the reaction of his wife to finding out who he’d been with. I left base with visions of his clothes on the snow-covered lawn when he got home.
Truth really is stranger than fiction.
Sorry about the gap recently, I’ve been mad busy sorting Mal’s wedding and other things. This one obviously did not take place recently.
Tags: Callout, missing person, Mountain Rescue, search, snow
This is a quick montage of images featured on the Kontraband.co.uk website.
I have to say that I think this is the most disgusting, embarrassing series of images I’ve seen of Cardiff. I love the city, there’s plenty to be proud of – but of a weekend night it seems to descend into hell.
Where is the local authority – those rubbish bins are far too small and too few. Where are the landlords and licensees that they’re selling alcohol to such inebriated customers without consideration for the law? Where is the Welsh Assembly in the lack of funding available for the police to deal with this kind of behaviour?
We found her sitting in amongst the trees. It was strange really, she was well prepared, but it was all just very strange.
We’d been called at about 1700 to search for a missing person near Swansea. I was at base quickly enough and once I was changed, I got the second vehicle ready to leave and off we went. Blue lighting it out of Dowlais along the A465 to Hirwaun is never fun – it’s a horrible piece of road and with plenty of spray and rain, we held back a bit. Once past Hirwaun, we were on a dual carriageway and then the M4. One last bit of driving through semi-urban areas and we were at the RV.
It was a pretty quick briefing. She’d been missing since the previous night. There was some concern for her safety. There wasn’t much to go on. Here’s your area, do your 300m search. Off you go.
The 300m search area is an interesting statistic. A lot of material has been collated in respect to missing person behaviour and the number of people found within 300m of the point where the missing person was last seen or was last known to be is very high. As a result, we frequently conduct a hasty search of the area immediately surrounding that point.
We’d only been searching for an hour or so – 300m doesn’t sound like much, but a circle of radius 300m is quite large – especially when it’s heavily wooded or scrubland. We’d met up with the second party and were just working out how best to attack the next area when one of the lads who was still walking back to us stopped. It took us a second to realise he was trying to attract our attention, but he’d seen something – and indeed, there she was. In a sleeping back with candles and a magazine, she lay in the forest, cold, wet and by now quite hypothermic.
We wasted no time tending to her and were soon handing her over to the Ambulance service for transport to hospital. The mad rush stopped and we started gathering our equipment – and our thoughts.
I stopped to think. How could she do that? I understand how people can get low enough to feel that there’s nothing left for them – I’ve had some pretty low points in my life and without the presence of good friends I’m not sure I wouldn’t have been in the same boat. But what I couldn’t understand was that she was sat there, under the trees, waiting. Within shouting distance of some houses, she lay there and let the elements take her – and that I couldn’t understand. I can fathom the need to end it all, but to passively lie there and wait…why the torture of waiting?
We’ve searched for a number of “despondent” people over the past few years. Some we’ve found safe and well and helped. Some we’ve been unable to provide anything but comfort for the family with the knowledge that they didn’t suffer. Some we’ve just not found. Each one is unique. You’re never sure if it’s a cry for help or a determined attempt to end it all. I’ve seen all age groups from teenagers to octagenarians, I’ve seen all manner of methods. I’ve accepted each one on it’s characteristics. This search struck a nerve in me, something happened there that I couldn’t understand.
I’m not sure I’ll ever understand how she could wait there, sitting in amongst the trees.
Tags: central beacons, despondent, drive, Mountain Rescue, serach, swansea
I’ve made it home. Just.
I drove up to Aberystwyth tonight to take Sean back for his lecture tomorrow. I checked the MetOffice reports, but after a bit of a snow shower around 1700 this afternoon, the only thing reported was “icy roads” – not normally a problem anywhere other than my street, so off we went. No problems and driving back was fine…until I hit Storey Arms. Well, I didn’t hit it – I’d slowed down a bit by that point. I knew that this was the worst part of my journey and the fingers of white creeping into my lane from the snow told me that it was a little chilly outside. I’m glad I did slow down, because after a little wobble at Storey Arms when I found the black ice, I slowed down a bit more. I was wrong about one thing though.
All the way down from the Storey Arms to the Beacons Reservoir the road was icy. I was crawling along at around 10mph when I started the descent down towards the Nant Ddu Lodge – and I’m glad I was because halfway down the hill, I saw blue lights. Letting the engine slow me down, I saw a police car pulled into one side with a car opposite him, halfway up a lamppost. The car in question had obviously visited both hedges before trying to climb the lamppost, but failed, leaving itself at approx 30 degrees. To be fair to the driver, at under 10mph, I was finding it challenging to keep the car going where I wanted it.
Carrying on down the road, I checked traction at the first Merthyr Roundabout and found that it had returned – looks like the salt’s done its job, I though. I was wrong.
I had a brief wobble over one of the bridges which I’d slowed down for, and so I kept my speed slow as I headed through the Merthyr area and down the next stretch of the A470 to Abercynon. I didn’t so much wobble as become aware that I had very little traction on the next piece, so I let the car drift down to a sedate 20mph and saw another RTC on the opposite carriageway, with another police car in attendance. Keeping the speed low, myself and another car made it down to Abercynon. Now, with the bad weather recently, the mountain road from Nelson has been closed, so I headed down the A470 towards Caerphilly. Keeping a good few hundred meters behind the car in front, we crossed the ice-covered viaduct at Abercynon and carried on towards Pontypridd – I was expecting the Trallwng corner to be bad – it’s an elevated section, banked and a very sharp corner. I was only doing 20mph so had plenty of time to see the police car with his lights on in the opposite carriageway waiting for the RTC and waving at me – presumably because I wasn’t driving like a loon.
The other car and I carried on down the A470 at a gentle pace of about 35mph, slowing down for the odd bridge - unlike the idiot in the white van that shot past us like we were stood still, wobbled precariously as he found the ice on the bridge up ahead and, having stabilised himself, carried on at a speed that was ridiculously dangerous for everyone on the road.
Whoever said you don’t need crampons in South Wales? Never mind the mountain, I almost whipped them out to get back to the house tonight. The car is at the bottom of the hill – I could see the ice shining like glass on the road as I approached and parked the car neatly out of the way. The walk up was interesting – going up a slope with little or no traction whilst hanging on to the fence must have been amusing to the cat who was sat watching me.
So, home safe. To bed for now, to see what joy tomorrow’s weather brings. I’ll be thinking of the lads and lasses that make up the three main emergency services who are out in the cold tonight as I cuddle up in my warm bed.
Tags: A470, Aberystwyth, Brecon Beacons, drive, driving, ice, road, sean, snow, Storey Arms, winter
Just a quick update – yesterday was a bit chaotic but I did manage to get work done and play in the snow though it’s becoming more and more apparent that the road up to my house is bad for weather. I only just managed to make it in today thanks to some judicious gritting by the council.
However, there’s more snow on the way tonight. The MetOffice has issued more weather alerts and further snow fall is due overnight. To add to that, several local authorities are now reporting that they are actually running out of salt for the roads. This, added to the latest alert, could result in some fairly catastrophic results – we’ll just have to wait and see tomorrow. I’ll be rechecking all my kit tonight then…
Tags: snow
It’s been snowing steadily for the last few hours and there’s now a good covering on the ground and on the roads. The main roads were OK on the way back to the house but as soon as I started heading into the Aber valley the roads were pretty bad – I only just managed to get back to the house with some careful driving.
Of course just as I kick my shoes off, the pager goes off. For once it’s a false alarm – random characters, though because I have poor reception here it takes a while to confirm that (thanks Mark!). Either way, it’s been snowing hard and now several of the roads in the area are treacherous to travel. I’m pretty surprised that we haven’t been out tonight at all – although the snow didn’t really hit until quite late giving people the chance to get home and shut the doors and settle down a bit. Speaking with a friend from the ambulance service, he said that the snow’s been keeping people indoors tonight which explains the peace we’re experiencing.
Looking at the snow out there, once the temperature drops overnight I think it’s going to be tough going getting out of here, so unless the snow melts by the morning, I can’t see myself heading into the office. I’ll see how it is in the morning, but at least I can work from home if I need to. I do however wish I was out playing in the snow.
Tags: snow
So, with Traffic Wales showing A465 Highest Point becoming treacherous and those people who live in Merthyr heading home from the office, I’m fairly amused since we’ve got a “light dusting” here.
[Update] It’s started snowing properly here now. Dan is heading out to “rescue” a friend of his who’s stuck in Penderyn with his car in Ystradfellte.
Tags: snow