Fifteen Mid-North teenagers have been put to the test in a large-scale exercise involving a mock plane crash, people lost in the bush, patients trapped in a car wreck and a massive fire.
The teens, aged 15-18 and from the Kawakawa-Moerewa area, had spent the previous six weekends with each of the emergency services, including Red Cross, Police, the Fire Service, Rural Fire, and Civil Defence.
Saturday's exercise was the climax of this year's Youth in Emergency Services (YES) programme and a chance for the trainees to put everything they had learned into practice.
Once the morning mist cleared, the teens were delivered by helicopter to the grounds of Moerewa's Affco meatworks where they were confronted by a blazing plane wreck. They had to put out the fire, assess and remove the injured passengers, then search for the missing pilot. He was found, hurt and disoriented, several hundred metres away in the bush.
Next the trainees were called to a car crash with four trapped people and lots of fake blood. They used the jaws of life to cut up the car, then carefully extricated the patients. Others tackled a fire in a giant stack of pallets simulating a collapsed building.
