Mercia Inshore Search and Rescue

With the improving Spring weather, so comes the increase in activity in terms of rescue calls and in the last couple of weeks Mercia have been involved in 2 searches, animal rescues and 3 person rescues, unfortunately a number of these were geared around the warm weather, people underestimating the river currents.

We now have the new Upton Station facility by the Marina entrance and this is now giving us a much better facility in terms of access and improving our response times.
 
The work has been quite involved in bringing this building up to the required standard and all the crew are now trainee Carpenters, Painters, Fence Constructors etc.

We now have the new rescue boat on the water and this will be permanently moored and again giving us a faster response.  The boat carries far more equipment than our smaller rescue and even carries a salvage pump in the event of any sinking or waterlogged craft on the river and even provides a limited fire fighting facility, again for boats in difficult locations.

Training continues to keep the crew up to standard and a further batch of people are shortly due to go up to Bala in order to train for their Swiftwater Qualification, this being in addition to their normal boat training requirement.

With the commissioning of the new Upton Station, we can now concentrate on the new Worcester Diglis Station and in early July we aim to have the new second station up and running.  This will have two Inshore Lifeboats based at Diglis Island, this providing a much needed facility covering the Weir and that surrounding area and overcoming the problem of no adequate slipway within Worcester City.

We are now looking for more local crew members and in addition we urgently need fundraisers to give just a couple of hours once a month, this being for our Strenstam collection.  Currently the crew have to cover both callouts, training and fundraising duties and we therefore need to increase our dedicated fundraisers in order to help our general crew efficiency to concentrate on the job in hand, but noting that we are totally funded by our own efforts and therefore fundraising duties are critical.

Anybody that can provide at least a couple of hours per month, would they please contact us on the 24 hours number 01684 593999.

Dave Walker
Team Manager