Page 94 - MERCIAN Eagle 2021

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WEST MERCIA SEARCH & RESCUE ERS AWARD
Captain Paul Tyrer – BCMO
On leaving the Regular Army, I found that I wasn’t ready to commit to the Reserves but soon realised that I had a void created from leaving service life. I decided that I wanted to get involved in voluntary work to help
in my local community but was unsure of what to do. I met up with an ex-colleague who volunteered with Mountain Rescue, and I really liked the idea of using the KSE from my career in the Army to assist people in need. Unfortunately, Shropshire and the West Midlands aren’t renowned for their mountainous regions so that wasn’t an option, however, a quick Google search led me to Lowland Rescue.
Lowland Rescue sits within the UK Search and Rescue matrix covering the ground between the Coastguard and Mountain Rescue and
consists of 36 affiliated
teams. The teams are
volunteers, and nobody
receives any financial
reward for their work.
It differs from Mountain
Rescue in that the
majority of missing
people we deal with
(MISPERS) tend to be
vulnerable adults and generally don’t want to be found. Subsequently, due to their vulnerable nature, a lot of the work that we do goes unreported to protect the MISPER,
this also makes fund raising a difficult task.
I joined West Mercia Search & Rescue in 2014 as a Land Search Technician. The region has a land mass of over 7500 square km which includes a significant amount of water ways,
making it one of the largest team areas in the UK. I quickly found that many of the skills that I had learned within the Army, such as first aid and navigation, were
easily transferable and I soon found myself being assessed to become a Team Leader. Although the work is unpaid, the training is first class and I’ve been extremely fortunate to attend a variety of courses including Quad Rider, Swift Water Rescue Technician, Flood Rescue Boat Operator and Water Team Commander.
The work is extremely rewarding, and I’ve been involved in a large number of searches over the past eight years, but the most rewarding experience was during the immediate response to the national flooding in 2020. I was called out on a
The teams are volunteers, and nobody receives any financial reward for their work
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