Rescuers hone their skills during the training. Photo: Dartmoor SRT Ashburton

Fines imposed on bankers for their misdemeanours have helped rescuers hone their skills.

Dartmoor Search and Rescue Ashburton volunteers spent the past two weekends training on rope rescues with experts from outdoors distributors Lyon Equipment.

Fines for Libor misconduct financed the mountain rescue ‘train the trainer’ activities, which were also attended by volunteers from Dartmoor teams Tavistock and Plymouth and representatives from Exmoor and Cornwall search and rescue teams.

The volunteers participated in the regional rollout of Mountain Rescue England and Wales’s rope rescue operator instructor courses delivered by Lyon Equipment. The course focused on executing safe and effective rope rescues and to pass on that training to their teams.

Those attending refined their skills in using technical equipment to access casualties in difficult steep ground or cliff faces and were given training on how to deliver that content back to their home teams.

Rope rescue skills are regularly used by Dartmoor Search and Rescue Ashburton for the extraction of casualties from the bottom of the River Dart gorge near Poundsgate, to rescue climbers from the cliffs at Haytor and for steep ground searches.

Rope team lead Simon Rhymes from the Ashburton team said: “This training course was a great opportunity for six of our volunteers to extend both their personal rope rescue capability and instructing skills under the expert tuition of Bill, Mark and Mike from Lyon Equipment.

“With these new-found skills we can continue to extend the professional service we offer to our local community.”

Bill Batson from Lyon Equipment said: “Lyon Equipment has a long history of involvement with mountain and cave rescue in the UK and we very much enjoyed delivering rope rescue instructor training to Dartmoor Search and Rescue Ashburton and other rescue teams from the Peninsula Mountain and Cave Rescue Association.

“We are delighted that the team members attending the course found it both useful and enjoyable.”

Several banks and financial institutions were fined for fraudulent rigging of the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate, which was widely used to set other interest rates throughout the world. The Government announced proceeds from the fines in the UK would go to support armed forces and emergency services charities and other related good causes.