Imagine being stranded in the jungle all alone with an injured leg, or trapped in a house during a hurricane or flood - those might sound like scenes out of action movies, but these things really do happen. And personnel from NEMO, Belize Red Cross and the Belize Institute of Search and Rescue have to know how to effectively respond to these emergencies and more. So they finished up a 4 day Advanced search and rescue training and I found out more.
Courtney Weatherburne reporting
Sleeping under a tent like this one for a week, braving the cold rainy nights, and not to mention constantly swatting those pestering insects, is certainly not for everyone, but this bunch handled it pretty well and made the best of this outdoor adventure.
They participated in a search and rescue training and they did most of their theory and practical sessions at this Mount Pleasant Camp. But today, they wrapped up the training at St. Herman's Cave on the Hummingbird Highway.
Wendy Garcia, Incident Commander, Belize Institute for Search and Research
"The first 2 days was basically classroom work and then after that they go more into the practical phase of things; implemented what you learned in the class and then put it into the field as a scenario phase to get a better feel of it. We conduct different phases of training. The technical with dealing with ropes and rappelling and all those stuff. So we do water rescue and the first aid training. The final exercise was conducted at St. Herman's Cave by Blue Hole National Park. That phase basically entails everything that we have taught from day 1, which is the patient assessment, the technical ropes, moving the patient in the river, floatation aids and all that stuff. All that was combine together a long with evacuation of a patient and extraction from that location out to a safe area."
Reporter
"How was this experience like for you? Have you done trainings like this before?"
Ashton Armstrong, Gardenia Resident
"For me this is my first time. The experience was really nice, because we learnt a lot and we had instructor here who were very knowledgeable about everything that they taught us. For me it was learning how to deal with a patient who is injured out there. How to go about dealing with that patient first-hand and the steps that you need to take to ensure that you as the rescuer do not get hurt and also so that while rescuing the patient - we as the rescuers do not further injured that patient."
And that is crucial in any emergency because it's the difference between life and death. The main idea of the training is to prepare community disaster response personnel for every possible worst case scenario.
Lily Bowman, Belize Red Cross
"It all has to do with disaster risk reduction and capacity building persons who are involved in the response and this particular training is an advanced search and rescue training. Within our CARSI project funded by the US Embassy, we train community disaster response teams and we got what they called "Light Search and Rescue." This is now a more advanced search and rescue taking them to another level and it is extremely important, because we all know that in times of disaster 
this might be one of the main activities that we have to carry out - searching for missing, displaced, lost injured people. In any emergency scenarios. It could be accident scene or some kind of mass destruction. So we are always looking at completing the person to respond."
There were 16 participants. There will be another round of training's coming up and about 30 more persons will be trained under this program.
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