Rescue success? No, a tragic failure of readiness

WHAT A fabulous image for International Women's Day. Carefree, gallous 90– year-old grandmother Gean Hodsdon , pictured in Saturday's Scotsman catapulting down the River Tay in a white water raft to raise money for poor families in Moldova. Lunch with friends, she said, would have been too tame.

Risk-taking, generous, brave – Gean's birthday outing brought a warm glow to Scots and nonagenarians everywhere.

Compare and contrast the fate of 44-year-old mother Alison Hume. She died of a heart attack after a mountain rescue team pulled her from the bottom of a disused mineshaft in Ayrshire. She had been lying there for six hours while firefighters stood at the top with ropes they were "unable" to use.

Everyone reading the haunting evidence from the Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) in Kilmarnock must have mentally traded places 100 times with those inexplicably hesitant rescuers and somehow rescued Alison.

In our minds we used ropes, brute strength, lengths of fire hose, a human tower the height of the hole – we did something as she lay dying.

The professional inaction that night represented a total and shocking role reversal. Firefighters normally tackle dangerous situations the public would avoid. These firefighters avoided a situation punters would have tackled without a second thought.

No matter how the evidence is presented, what happened is incomprehensible. A complete failure of nerve in the face of a mere memo. The kind of thing most of us manage to sidestep five days a week.

And if that isn't shocking enough, two years on, the same thing would happen all over again.

Even though there are up to 4,000 similar disused mine shafts in Ayrshire, a woman died and firefighters are still emotionally devastated, Senior Fire Officer Freddie Howe told the FAI: "We still do not have a line rescue team."

It's hard not to come to the conclusion that the rise of mindless and non-negotiable health and safety rules reflects our decline as a common sense-based society.

It's even harder not to conclude that memo-conscious Group Commander Paul Stewart must be a pedant, a management lackey and a cold-hearted man impervious to the human urge to help. And yet the truth may be a bit more complicated.

According to testimony, the rescue conditions were far from straightforward. There was no smooth edge to the hole, the sides were overhanging and the biggest fear was that pressure would lead to a complete collapse which would bury both Alison Hume and Sandy Dunn – the fireman who had been lowered with oxygen, first-aid kit and a light thermal blanket at the start of the rescue operation.

It could have been debris coming loose during his descent that caused a change of heart about the wisdom of using ropes – not just the memo itself, which told officers not to use personal safety kit to rescue others.

The Working at Heights regulation – issued in 2008 months before the incident – requires fire crews to use a harness if they are working more than a few metres off the ground. The harness should be tied off to a chimney (in a fire), or to the cage of a fire engine (in an underground rescue), to offer safer ascent or descent on a crumbling structure. But on the moor at Galston there was no fire engine standing by – nothing that could bear the weight of the harness. So it rested on the crumbling sides of the hole.

Mrs Hume had chest injuries, and pulling her up clumsily might have caused further injury. Since Strathclyde had only this "personal" kit and no "line rescue" kit, they had no cuff to stop ropes from tearing or eroding the sides of the hole. Instead, those senior officers had fear. Fear that a badly organised "have a go" rescue might kill Alison and several firemen and prompt their own prosecution under corporate manslaughter charges.

Last month, three senior Warwickshire officers were arrested for gross negligence and breaching health and safety law after four firefighters died in a fire at a local vegetable packing plant in 2007. They were first questioned in 2008, months before the Alison Hume incident.

About the same time, firefighter Tam Brown earned public plaudits and procedural brickbats for saving a drowning woman from the River Tay in Perth. His rope tore against sharp edges on the riverbank and the two were plunged back into the river mid-rescue – but happily survived.

Many other rescuers have not been so lucky – more firefighters have died in the past five years than in the past 20.

Why? In 2005 the Fire Scotland Act transformed the old fire brigades into fire and rescue services, adding road accidents, chemical spills, floods and urban search and rescue to the original fire and fire prevention duties.

More duties but not more kit – witness firemen wading through freezing floods in uniforms designed to keep officers cool during fires.

At the same time, the old Fire Brigades Advisory Council was abolished. It allowed co-ordination between brigades and joint work to identify and produce guidance on dangerous scenarios.

Since 2005, that hasn't happened. If it did, officers at Galston might have called on neighbouring Lothian and Borders or the Mine Rescue Service, either of which could have been on the scene quickly with all the right kit.

If this was a foreseeable accident it should have been planned for by Strathclyde fire chiefs. If it was not foreseeable – in a mining area – why not? And why is there still no procedure in place, even if it is to share the specialist teams of neighbouring forces?

Last week, First Minister Alex Salmond said a joint UK Health and Safety and Fire Service statement on 12 March will clarify matters. It won't.

Strathclyde firefighters need to have the right kit to save lives – including their own.

And Commander Paul Stewart needs to apologise for describing the Galston rescue as a success to fix a badly broken relationship with Alison Hume's family and the Scottish public.