At Ruth Lee Ltd we are dedicated to helping professionals who save lives, by providing them with hard-wearing and high quality manikins for their training.
We love to hear about the range of exercises that our manikins are used in, so we were pleased to receive some photos, kindly sent by the UK Civil Air Patrol, which is a registered charity operating throughout the UK with a fleet of 60 manned and an increasing number of small unmanned aerial vehicles.
These great photographs were taken by the UK Civil Air Patrol during Exercise ‘Prince Bishop’ on the 10th July 2016 in the centre of Durham City. The River has sadly claimed the lives of several people in the past few years. In a period of just 15 months, 3 university students fell into the river and drowned in the Centre of Durham at night.
The scenario created was an accident involving the river cruiser, ‘Prince Bishop’ with injured people on the boat and others missing in the River Wear. This was a multi-agency search and rescue exercise including the Durham & Darlington Fire and Rescue Service, HM Coastguard, the North-East Ambulance Hazardous Area Rescue Team (HART) and of course, The Civil Air Patrol.
During the exercise the Civil Air Patrol used a small unmanned aircraft (SUA), often called a ‘drone’, to search the river for the missing persons – including our manikins! The SUA ‘pilot’ Ian Povey is a commercial SUA operator with a Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) ‘permission’ to conduct aerial work. A difficult and skilled task due to the proximity of many buildings in the town.
We are always amazed by the variety of training exercises our manikins are used for and from looking at the photos sent, we identified a Duty Range manikin, two Man Overboard manikins (one an older style), and a rare Man Overboard Bariatric manikin made as a special request for one of our customers some years ago – we are glad to see he is still in such good shape!
*Photos kindly provided by the UK Civil Air Patrol