SARAID will be at the Emergency Services Show in 23-24 November, Stoneleigh Park, Coventry.

 We are stand E14 in Emergency Response Zone

Come meet the team and we will be happy to talk to you regarding our International SAR work and how you can help with our on going efforts to save life’s. 

To donate via text to SARAID just do the following. If you want to give £5 to help support our work text USAR11 £5 to 70070. The maximum donation allowed is £10 and you will receive a text message from SARAID once completed.

SARAID has now stood down from assisting in a lowland search alongside Wiltshire Lowland Search and Rescue Team and Wiltshire Police. Grateful thanks were expressed to SARAID for assisting during this busy few days.

22.3.11

SARAID is now assisting with an ongoing missing person search in Wiltshire at the request of the Wiltshire Police and Wiltshire Lowland Search and Rescue Team. A team was deployed this afternoon to assist in searching the wooded terrain and to work alongside the many volunteers that had come from the surrounding area.

On Monday morning we received a letter from the Japanese Embassy confirming that they are not requesting our assistance with the search and rescue effort in Japan. The main reason for this is that despite teams like SARAID being self sufficient, we still require support from the local government to operate. We would have a required a supply of fuel and raw water for the team, we would have had to arrange transportation and we would have required direction as to how best to assist the Japanese people. One particular problem in the current situation is responsibility for the location of people within Japan. If the evacuation zone around the Fukushima nuclear plants increases then teams working in the area need to be notified and responsibility for monitoring and notifying teams can take significant resources. 

The Japanese government recognises the challenges it has in dealing with the current situation, and in particular the management of the situation. For this reason it has not requested significant amounts of international assistance but has thanked the team for their offer of assistance.

SARAID has chosen to keep monitoring the situation as it may change and requests for assistance can come from other sources. Given the current situation and the time since the earthquake it looks increasingly unlikely that SARAID will deploy a team to Japan. The team does however remain prepared to deploy to any countries which may need our specialist experience and assistance. 

We get many queries about what the team is doing immediately following an event like the tsunami in Japan: are we busy, are we planning to deploy, what can you do to help? 

The best way to answer these questions is probably to talk through the events of today from the teams perspective which will hopefully give you a good sense of where we are right now as a team. 

Events for us started immediately following the tsunami. News reports, and information through system like Facebook and Twitter meant that a number of team members knew about the event within about an hour of it happening. As soon as one team member finds out we notify the rest of the operational team through our notification system D4H no matter what the time of day, and this morning was no exception.

Once the team has been informally notified it is normally the Operations Directors decision about how to deal with the event. We can not mobilise the team for every disaster we hear about because many times the event is too small for the team to meaningfully deploy. This morning this definitely was not the case and within a couple of hours of the event the Operations Director had checked availability of the team, put in an offer of assistance to the Japanese embassy in London and had notified the rest of the search and rescue world of our availability through a system known as Virtual OSOCC. These are the three key tasks we have to undertake for any mission to take place and the faster rescue teams move, the more people will be saved. 

Having done these key tasks the team is largely now waiting to find out what will happen. Each team member will often do one last check of their bags, although they are usually already packed and ready to go. It is vital that team members can take some time to relax in this period, arriving at an incident tense and tired before work even begins can cause a number of problems. Having said that, it is certainly not all rest for all the team members. In addition to embassies, we get in touch with a number of our contacts to identify if there is a more effective channel for our resources and skills, we gather information on disaster affected countries, and we have to field a number of queries from the press. Today has been no different with many team members spending time monitoring the situation and talking to colleagues. 

The two things that the team is waiting for is either a request for the teams assistance from the Japanese authorities or a more general request for international assistance. Although this would normally be a request for search and rescue assistance this can be other forms of assistance because of the diverse skill set within teams like SARAID. 

So far the Japanese have formally requested assistance from a number of countries in their region. This approach of taking assistance from local countries ahead of teams from further afield is critical to the international search and rescue communities way of working. Any host country only requires a certain amount of assistance and if every team deployed the host country, already impacted by the disaster, the host country would struggle to support the all of the teams flying into country. To deal with this a limited number of teams may be asked to deploy and it is always better to get teams that will arrive quickly because time really is important. For this reason local teams or normally best placed to provide assistance because they have less distance to travel. 

With the Japanese government so far only requesting search and rescue assistance from USA, Australia, New Zealand and Republic of Korea the SARAID team members will remain on standby to assist either in Japan or in any other country affected by the earthquake where our assistance is needed. 

SARAID is monitoring the situation in Japan and around the Pacific - We are preparing to place a team on standby, should they be required.

9.00am 11th March.

SARAID will be holding an open morning on Sunday 30th January for potential new members.

If you are interested in joining SARAID or would like to know more about the charity then please feel free to come along.

Presentations from experienced members, the point of view of members under training and examples of equipment that we use will all be available for you to observe and hear from.

For people hoping to join SARAID this will be followed with a selection weekend in early march.

If you are interested in joining an NGO Urban Search and Rescue team then please contact us via the contacts page of the website.

Look forward to seeing you on the 30th.

Some training in pairs at the recent November Training session. Working at Breaching and Breaking during last weekends snowy weekend. It was cold but the guys and girls worked well to expand their skills.  

SARAID has now finished it’s operational assessment. 30 plus members attended the exercise where we tested the technical skills and operational disciplines of the team. Rope work, medical support, coordination, technical search and complicated rescues all formed part of these long few days.

We hope to have a few more photos up here soon for you to see some of the work that we do.

As always, it is only with the on going support of the British public that we can deploy around the world to use our skills in saving the lives of people affected by natural disasters.

So if you think you have skills to offer or would like to donate to the charities work - then follow the links contained in this web site.