IRT training round-up: June 5-7

June's International Response training weekend round-up, brought to you by Serve On volunteer Pete...

This weekend was centered around a practice deployment to an earthquake-ravaged island.

We arrived at our London HQ at 20:00 hrs on Friday to be briefed on a fictional earthquake scenario. We then had to select and pack team kit and run through setting up an Operations Room, accessing and completing the information and documents that would enable us to deploy.

We researched the environment we would be heading in to and attempted to get everything ready to travel to our imaginary disaster zone. The “flight” went well apart from a bit of dodgy driving on the A3 and the rain and wind increasing by the minute.

We arrived in-country and were directed to a rather desolate, rain and windswept area to set up our Base of Operations. At around 02:30 on Saturday morning we got some rest, ready to go to work in a few hours time.

No one slept that well; I was woken up every time my tent slapped me in the face for daring to close my eyes.

There was a surprise benefit to our bleak location, although I have definitely used dryer bathrooms for the morning ablutions, none of them have had a view over Gosport Harbour and our Navy's new aircraft carrier. I only hope that they weren't looking back!

By 08:00 we were learning how to conduct a level 2 search of our sector. We learned to map the area, looking for potential work sites where survivors may be located, noting hazards along the way. This info was passed back up the chain to allow the planning of a more in depth search of the sector. That done we moved on to actually searching the locations we had identified earlier.

The rain was finally easing and we were no longer getting blown about quite so much. The directing staff obviously felt that we were much too comfortable, so instructed us to search a short section of tunnel for survivors.

We went into the space in pairs, in full protective equipment, helmets, goggles, respirator, gloves and overalls. If that wasn't claustrophobic enough the “space” was more suited to small children than grown adults - some more grown than others.

The task of searching and mapping the tunnel took about 20 minutes per pair.

Lots of us had not been in a space this confined before, or if we had, it was a while ago. Our natural fear of that environment had to be overcome and then we could get on with the task. Safe to say, there were a few “moments” on the corners and narrow sections, but everyone completed the search, and there were lots of smiling faces after.

The rest of Saturday was spent learning more search procedures and extracting a surprisingly heavy casualty from a rubble pile, before packing up and travelling back to HQ. Tea, medals and a debrief followed.

Sunday was an admin day, after a few lessons on communications procedures we moved on to sorting all the wet kit out, re packing and a bit of decorating our new operations room. We also had a very pleasant surprise as one of our team, Merv, had arranged the donation of 10 helmets from Team Wendy. These look awesome and we are looking forward to using them more in the future.

Looking forward to next month.