Marine Rescue Southern Zone Commander Mike Hammond talks about the Batemans Bay SAREX

Transcript

00:00 will bring together our rescue units from Eden up to Ulladulla

00:03 at Batemans Bay to run a search and rescue exercise with our partner

00:07 agencies, principally the New South Wales Police Force,

00:10 Marine Area Command but also Surf Life Saving New South Wales and

00:14 some other agencies that we work with and we do this to practice our search

00:18 and rescue skills, make sure that we are using the best

00:22 possible techniques and learning any lessons we can learn

00:25 from real incidents we've experienced over the course of the year.

00:30 Yes, our intention is to run it offshore. It's important that we

00:33 exercise in the types of conditions we're likely to experience in a real

00:36 search, so unless it's really, really bad weather

00:39 we'd be out offshore.

00:42 The scenarios are realistic partly because

00:47 they are based on real events and rescues that we've performed,

00:51 sometimes modified with different lessons from different incidents

00:55 combined, so a lot of time is taken to make sure

00:58 that they're as realistic as possible so that we really test our capability

01:02 and provide the opportunity for learning and growth.

01:06 It takes a lot of work to organise these sort of events but

01:10 they're really worthwhile in testing our ability to coordinate lots of resources,

01:15 lots of people, different agencies and deal with

01:18 scenarios that evolve over time, so it's not just a simple scenario

01:22 where we go out and deal with one thing, it usually evolves

01:26 over the course of the exercise to bring in different variables and so that

01:29 really tests out our capabilities.

01:33 [Sound of a wind]

01:37 [BLANK_AUDIO]