Goals of the group :

1/  To carry out vertical rescue where directed by the Police or other accredited rescue authorities.

2/  To provide local knowledge, advice and assistance for any incident or rescue as requested by the Police or other accredited rescue authorities.

Our place in the official rescue network :

We agreed to position ourselves just below the level which requires official accreditation for all members.

Degree of formality of our group :

Our group is essentially a contact list of skilled and trained climbers. To maintain credibility and a high standard it will be necessary to train regularly together and in joint exercises with the Police or other accredited rescue authorities. The regular training and maintenence of the contact list will necessitate a low level organisational structure including a committee, Team Leaders and development and grading of a list of members.

Legal Issues :

The police or other accredited rescue authority can call us out and use us at their discretion. We can be called out as Authorised Volunteers, which under the State Rescue Act covers us as individuals legally if something goes wrong. More research into this issue will take place.

The State Rescue Policy, section 1.24 under the heading "Response Policy", states that Police or other accredited rescue authority has the authority to call-out any rescue resource whether accredited or not, which, in their opinion, is required to undertake a rescue or to assist in a rescue.

Minimum criteria & evaluation of potential members:

We agreed that the committee should evaluate new members using a combination of a list of criteria and their own discretion. Discretion may be used to exclude a potential member who meets the technical criteria or it may be used to include a potential member who does not satisfy all the criteria but who the committee deems is suitable.

There are two categories within the group - Team Leaders are capable of managing a rescue from start to finish and will be required to make decisions regarding set ups, site utilisation, management of people and strategy. Ordinary Members will form the bulk of the rescue team and will have roles including belaying, hauling, rope management, communications etc.

How do the official rescuers know what they are getting if they call us?

Internal structure - we have supplied the official rescue authorities with a call-out list of names and numbers for the committee (the Team Leaders). The Team Leaders who respond will then lead our group during any response. If we cannot supply at least one Team Leader our group does not attend the rescue. By adopting this protocol the police always know they'll get a Team Leader that they know and who is capable of running our side of any incident. Team Leaders will evaluate our group members and asign tasks appropriate to each person's level of ability. Experienced members will be given the more responsible and skilled tasks while less-experienced members will be used in a support role.

Joint training - whenever possible we invite the accredited rescue services to join us on training days to build relations. On most practice days we see a few official rescuers and these days have proven to be very constructive in both sharing knowledge and in getting to know each other.