Dovehole Crag, Ford Moss

Incident Type: Rescue

On Saturday, ourselves and North of Tyne Mountain Rescue Team received a request from the North East Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust for a climber with suspected serious injuries at Dovehole Crag, near Ford Moss. A community paramedic and NEAS crew were already on scene but needed assistance to extricate the casualty, who had fallen whilst bouldering.

One of our duty controllers took initial activation but quickly handed over to a second controller so that he could deploy directly to the incident site to act as incident commander. The teams were then called out with two 4×4 response vehicles deployed on blue lights.

With the first mountain rescue personnel on scene at 14.25hrs, it was confirmed that our response vehicle, Curlew Echo, could be driven to within 30 metres of the incident site. The casualty was quickly packaged in a vacuum mattress before being placed on a Titan stretcher for the evacuation. Following a short but awkward stretcher carry, which was managed with a back rope through some steep sections in the woods, the casualty was handed into the care of the ambulance service.

The incident involved a total of 15 Team members for 2 hours and 42 minutes.