Sunshine Coast (Ground) SAR teamed up with Airspan Helicopters Ltd. Wednesday to rescue a man near Egmont.
The man was on the Sutton Islets (just off the banks of Egmont) June 5 when he fell from a ladder, SAR manager Alec Tebbutt told Coast Reporter, and broke his leg “fairly badly.”
Ground SAR has a couple of members who live up that way, so when the call came in, they used their boat to go over to the island and stabilize the man, while other SAR members secured a helicopter. (They had tried to secure the water taxi that’s usually right around there but it wasn’t available.)
“[The SAR members] were able to fully package him, get him into the helicopter and bring him back to Sechelt Airport so that we could put him in the ambulance,” Tebbutt told Coast Reporter. “It was a fairly serious leg fracture, so we wanted to get them out of there as quickly as possible.”
The man was conscious when he left Ground SAR’s care.
While Ground SAR doesn’t need to use Airspan Helicopters often, the two local organizations train together a couple of times a year so that both are ready in case of emergency. They do hover exit training so all Ground SAR members can get in and out of the helicopter while it’s in the air.
“Airspan, they do so much in the community,” said Tebbutt. “They're an enormous help to us.”
The Sutton Islets rescue was the third callout in just over a week, said Tebbutt, callouts picking up after a slow period.
