This week’s training was all about the station search.
The station search is part of search and rescue training but focused on the immediate station environment. There are lots and lots of buildings, storage containers and vehicles on a station, a surprising number of places that you could accidentally lock yourself in or be stuck with a sprained ankle. Although we all carry radios, the whole team is fairly aware of making sure they see or speak to each other regularly during the day.
If we haven’t seen each other for a few hours and can’t get a response on the radio then a station search is the quickest way to locate each other.
The station is divided into several search zones and teams of two are allocated a specific area to search. Each zone area can include four to five buildings plus vehicles, storage containers and large areas of rock. Running through the list as a desktop refresher, there are so many hidden areas that a lot of us didn’t even know about. Basements in the workshop, roof spaces in the red shed, explosive caches — don’t worry we won’t search in there.
Early on the day of the search, Tony D (field training officer) can be seen cruising around the station on the quad bike planting clues that search teams have to find and report. After lunch, the search began — we were looking for ‘Ralph’ (the station’s imaginary friend), who hadn’t arrived for lunch. We split into pairs and everyone headed off to their individual search zones. It was only 15 minutes into the exercise and the first clue was located by Janelle and Jose in the library. Cal and Craig returned with frozen beards and red faces from searching down near the wharf and fuel farm. Josh and Gav lost their piece of paper that listed where to search and ended up doing two zones instead of one.
After an hour and a half, the station had been searched and we were all pretty happy that we knew what to do if we had to look for each other. We even found a few new areas of the station — I mean who knew we had a spray paint bay or that we had a building called budgie!