Loch Awe tragedy produces commonsense conclusions
published this on 4:41 pm, Monday, 7th December, 2009News| Rescue | Comments (rss) | Respond | Ping |
A review of rescue services and safety issues on Scotland’s huge freshwater estate was commissioned by the Scottish Government following the avoidable deaths of four pike fishermen near Kilchurn Castle on Argyll’s Loch Awe in March 20o9.
The men who died were brothers, 47 year-old William and 42 year-old Steven Carty, 36 year-old Thomas Douglas and 3o year-old Craig Currie. Their families have recently presented a cheque for £8,000,raised by their own efforts, to a fund purchasing an inshore rescue boat for Loch Awe.
The report, by former Chief Inspector of Constabulary in Scotland, Paddy Tomkins, has now been published.
The scale of what Mr Tomkins had to deal with is best described by statistics: 75,000 miles of river and 27,000 freshwater lochs together making up no less than 90% of Britain’s standing freshwater.
And no single agency has – or will have, following this report – statutory responsibility for freshwater rescue in Scotland, excluding flood conditions.
Mr Tomkins has put commonsense first – largely quite rightly and largely effectively. His thesis is that there is no point in making one authority responsible for freshwater rescue because the resources it would require are immense and simply could not be provided.
He has carried out an audit of what current rescue services do. He has been impressed by the operating relationship between the police and the voluntary mountain rescue teams. He feels that this is a model that can usefully be adopted across a spectrum of rescue services.
He has interrogated the knowledge base of each existing service and has sometimes been shocked at what they do not know about the systems and resources of their fellow services.
He has also taken from his engagement with the mountain rescue teams, a comment made by one member – that ‘the mountains are really safe as long as you remember how dangerous they are’. This is his motto for the public to keep in mind.
His recommendations focus on better use of what exists:
- developing fully the knowledge of and data on resources held by which service in which area;
- improving communications between the various rescue services and agencies and the police;
- seeing Scotland’s 8 Strategic Co-ordinating Groups (SCGs) carry out a risk assessment in their respective areas, making public what they can do and what they can’t
- seeing all of Scotland’s fire and rescue services put together a national register of freshwater rescue assets
As far as the SCGs are concerned, they are multi-agency groups based in police force areas and are chaired by police chief constables and local authority chief executives. They cover the 8 areas of: Lothian & Borders, Dunfries & Galloway,Central, Fife, Strathclyde, Tayside, Grampian and Highlands & Islands.
They have plans in place to respond to all kinds of events. These plans are regularly tested in joint exercises and during real emergencies but they failed in the case of the Loch Awe drownings.
Part of this was born of lack of communication and lack of the habit of communications and of sharing information. Mr Tomkins has had in the forefront of his mind the fact that the Glencoe Mountain Rescue team could have had an inshore boat at Loch Awee in half the time it took to bring the one from Paisley that was called in. But no one contacted them.
These deficiencies in practice are what Mr Tomkins is most concerned to have addressed and they underpin his recommendations.
Beyond this, he is calling for measures to increase public awareness of safety in freshwater activities – angling, canoeing, white water kayaking, camping and just walking – with children, the elderly and dogs, along the banks of rivers and lochs.
Where his commonsense approach will not quite fill the bill is that when the resources held everywhere by the various authorities and agencies are collated, there will be some gaps and they will need to be filled.
The photograph above of Kilchurn Castle on Loch Awe is by copyright holder Sue Anderson of Island Focus and may not be reproduced without permission.
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