It’s hard to believe that it is now 3 years
since I last renewed my Swift Water Rescue Technician ticket for the mountain
rescue team but last weekend was time to do it again. This is one of those occasions when it is
essential to have a clear, concise briefing about what we will be doing. Once the rescue begins the noise of the water
makes communication difficult and we cannot use radio equipment where it is
going to be drenched. So it is vital
that we have a Plan A, a Plan B and clear signals if and when we have to change
from one to the other. It sounds simple
but of course needs to be very well planned to actually do it. As ever, it was a really good weekend.
Once back at work, I returned to a project
in Braithwaite, one of our lovely Lake District villages. As the village has developed over
generations, layers of drainage systems have been installed and sometimes their
exact position is long forgotten. There
have been some flooding problems and I have been working with the Parish
Council and residents of the village to decide how to solve them. During my round of knocking on doors to
explain what we are going to do, I came across one resident who remembered the
installation of a land drain and showed me its position. This is going to be a very useful find
because we can feed a new drain into it.
Later in the week I returned to Cat Gill
with Leila, our academy ranger, and some of the guys from the footpath
team. You might recall that I was up
there recently to fell some trees across a short cut that people have started
to use. Unfortunately it is in a
position where it could develop into serious erosion quite quickly so I want to
discourage its use as soon as possible. The
last time I looked at this, it turned out to be too windy to fell the trees as
accurately as I wanted them but this time was successful.
As I did that,
the footpath team improved the condition of part of the pitched path. Most people do prefer to use a well-built and
maintained path so we think that problem will be solved now.
Daisy here,
I’ve been playing in the woods. It’s
great. I love running around and I went
to play with the footpath team. They think I’m crazy.
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