2024 Highland Heroes Emergency Service

Emergency Service - Kyle RNLI.

Transcript

00:00 Well congratulations, can you just give me your name and tell me if you can remember the category

00:05 that you've just won? Yeah my name is Andy MacDonald and I'm part of Caledonial

00:09 L.I. and we've won emergency services of the year. Okay the obvious question, how did that feel?

00:15 Amazing to be honest we never expected it at all. And you saw you mentioned to me before some of the

00:21 other people in the category so it's presumably quite humbling. Oh definitely so the other

00:27 nominations were just unbelievable, fantastic and when we saw the calibre of who we were up against

00:32 we thought there's no chance we didn't think for a minute that we would win. Yeah but can you tell

00:37 me a little bit about the incident which I think prompted the nomination that you got? Yeah. And

00:44 was it very unusual? It was quite unusual, we get called to quite a few missing persons or overdue

00:49 walkers and things but this one was a bit unusual because the amount of time that the walker had

00:54 been missing for. When we got called out, the remote location, us helping the other emergency

01:02 services as well, taking them to the various locations to search. Normally we crew change

01:07 every three and a half hours whereas this time because we knew it was a sort of emerging situation

01:15 we just kept going, kept out there and luckily managed to find them. And I think you said

01:22 the reward for that is often it's the gratitude isn't it from the relatives? Yeah it's the look

01:29 in their faces when you can reunite somebody with their family especially when they've been

01:33 missing for that amount of time. It's amazing, that's all the thanks we need is just the look

01:39 in their faces when they're reunited. And I could see from it's a real team effort, you're closely

01:45 bonded, there's a lot of people involved. Yeah we're from all walks of life, all ages and we

01:51 just come together, train every Monday and have a bit of a laugh but when the pager goes off it's

01:56 planning, put the training into practice and just do the best we can. Yeah and you rely on of course

02:03 the public support at all times and it's always forthcoming isn't it? Yes it's purely funded by

02:10 the donations of the public. It's the 200 year anniversary of the NLI, that was just last Monday

02:18 that we celebrated that and it's just thanks to the public's donations that we can keep going.

02:24 The boats and all the training and the equipment we use, it takes a lot to keep them going and if

02:30 it weren't for the public we just simply couldn't do that. Yeah and you would encourage people to

02:34 consider getting involved because I know there are many roles. Yeah yeah people always think that

02:41 when it comes to lifeboat it's always out at sea and being on the boat, being part of the crew,

02:45 but there's so much more than that as well. It's being involved in the shore crew side of things,

02:49 the volunteering side of things, the station management side of things and we're always

02:54 looking for more volunteers and we just welcome anybody that's interested just get in touch.