Twitter appeal leads to new rescue team in Shropshire

The team has been set up to respond quickly to major incidents across the county. At the moment teams need to be scrambled from West Midlands Search & Rescue Team in Worcester to help.

Twenty volunteers will be completing their training during the next month, and the team in Shropshire will be officially launched in March.

It comes after WMSRT officials appealed for people in Shropshire to sign up through a message on Twitter.

Dean Astley, a retained firefighter who will be leading the Shropshire team alongside pub landlord Chris Birdsell, said: "At the moment if the search and rescue team gets called out to Shropshire it takes a long time to get together and come up from Worcester. We thought we could do with a Shropshire branch.

"A message came over Twitter to ask if anyone would consider being a volunteer if a branch was set up in Telford, and we volunteered.

"We have to go on a lot of courses – water rescue and marine radio and courses to learn how to handle the boat. We're booked in to complete those in the next few weeks, so we should be up and running by next month."

The team members will be on call 24 hours a day in case of emergencies, and could find themselves called out to anything from a swan stuck in the middle of a river to major searches, like those carried out in Machynlleth for missing schoolgirl April Jones.

But in order to be able to respond as quickly as possible to any call outs, the team is looking for somewhere to base itself in the Telford area.

The team is currently holding meetings at the Wrekin View pub in Dawley Bank, where Chris is the landlord, but is looking for a more permanent base to store all its equipment, including a rescue boat.

"We've got a lot of kit as well - helmets and dry suits and so on. It's a bit like running a fire station with the amount of kit we've got."

l Anyone who can help the team to find a base for equipment in the Telford area is asked to get in touch on 07789 380337.