Organiser’s Comments

It was a good event in a great area today and thanks to the many Aire members who made it possible. Plus of course Harry Dowdell from CLARO who was our controller.

The event seemed to go pretty smoothly but, as always, there were lessons to be learnt for future events, the main one being:-

Regrettably we had a major safety incident when one of our competitors suffered a stroke out on the fell shortly after leaving the Upper Start. He was attended by one of our first aiders and the Air Ambulance, who were called via a mobile phone, took him to Airedale hospital. Our plan for dealing with such an event was followed but could have been improved by:-

Having a pre-written script as part of the safety notes to read out to the emergency services describing where the upper start was together with grid reference.
Relying on mobile phones rather than walkie-talkies to communicate between the upper start and assembly.

Neil Stevens

Planners Comments

Because of the widespread locations of the 2 starts and the finish the only way to test the boxes in sequence would be to do it before the boxes were taken out into the Field.

Perhaps a lesson to be learnt is for the planner or others putting out the boxes to have received some training about how these boxes work. In hindsight I should have got in touch with Martin on the assembly field when my own dibber did not register in the finish boxes, but because the cleared dibbers worked I assumed everything was OK. I did not realise there was a difference in how the Start and Finish boxes were programmed.

It was not possible for Harry, as Controller, to check the finish before the first competitor finished as he was checking the top start and could not be in 3 places at the same time. I expect that this is quite often the case at events.

I think your most important lesson for the future is to do a risk assessment, but I think you had already done one and had also attempted to solve the communication problem. I think the incident just emphasizes how important it was to have these procedures in place.

Hilary Allen

Controllers comments:

Standing at the finish it was clear that the courses were well received. This was entirely due to the efforts of the planning team over a restricted time frame. Particular thanks must go to Tony Thornley who put in a great deal of work on the moor both as planner and mapper. The quality of the planners output was such that my input was restricted to verifying that the courses complied with BOF rules & guidelines and that the control sites were correctly located & fairly represented on the map. Invariably they were. For White, Yellow and Orange courses the navigational skills required, the features to be used and overall nature of courses are clearly defined. The guidelines are available for all on the BOF website. Click on Events then Regulations. Some may find a review of the guidelines against the junior competitors skills beneficial.

Neil organised the event in such a way that all went smoothly. Even the major incident on the fell was handled efficiently within the event's emergency procedure. Well done.

Harry Dowdell