Slides That Follow Your Voice: Welsh Accent Safety Briefing

Slide 1: Night exercise, Moel Gwyllt

0:17Right, everyone in, door shut, dogs under the table. Thank you. Phones on silent but not off, because if the real pager goes we're leaving, and the exercise doesn't get a vote.

Slide 2: Nobody is actually lost

0:29For the new faces, I'm Gethin, I'm team leader tonight, and this is the briefing for the night exercise on Moel Gwyllt. It's a training night, nobody is actually lost, and I say that every time because one year somebody didn't hear it and spent two hours searching a gully for a man called Dafydd who was sitting in the van eating a sandwich. [laughs] He's never lived it down. He's here. Dafydd, stand up. There he is. He's brought a sandwich. He brings one every year. Okay. Sit down, Dafydd. Scenario.

1:02Scenario. At twenty-one hundred we get a call. Two walkers, overdue, last seen at the stile below the north ridge at about four this afternoon, heading up. One of them has a phone with eight percent battery and no signal.

Slide 3: Scenario, 21:00: two walkers overdue

1:17The weather we're briefing for is the real weather, which tonight is cloud base at five hundred, five hundred and fifty metres, six hundred by midnight, the forecast says, so lower than that, really, wind forty kilometres an hour from the west, gusting sixty on the ridge, and a temperature of three degrees in the car park, which on the ridge, with that wind, means your hands stop working in about twenty minutes without gloves. Wear the gloves. I'll say that again later. Wear the gloves.

1:47Teams. Three teams of four. Team one, Carys leading, takes the north ridge path from the stile. Team two, Huw, takes the old quarry track and the eastern slope. No, hang on, Huw's the quarry, yes. Me, then. Team three, with me, goes up the stream, because that's where people go when they come down in the dark and the path disappears, and it's where we found the real ones in twenty twenty-two, and in twenty nineteen, and in twenty sixteen.

Slide 4: Three teams of four

2:16Casualties are being played by Megan and Tomos, they're out there now, they're cold, and they've been told to be difficult, so expect that. [chuckles]

2:26Radios. Channel two, check in every twenty minutes, and if you have nothing to say, say nothing to say, because silence on the radio sounds exactly like a dead battery and I will send someone to find you. Grid references in six figures, read twice. Find someone, you say found, grid, condition, and then you shut up so Control can think.

Slide 5: Radios: channel 2

2:50Kit, the kit list, right. Kit. You know the list, but I'll say the three things people forget. Spare torch, not spare batteries, a spare torch, because changing batteries on a ridge in a gale is a skill none of us have. Group shelter, one per team, and you practise getting into it before you need it, not when the casualty is already shaking.

Slide 6: The three things people forget

3:13And a flask, because this is a four-hour exercise and the single biggest factor in how well a team thinks at one in the morning is whether it's had something warm, it's had something warm.

3:25I learned that from a man who led this team for twenty-two years and never once went up without a flask of tea you could stand a spoon in. He's retired. He still texts me on exercise nights, just the one word, flask. I reply yes. Every time. That's the whole exchange. Anyway.

3:45Safety. This is an exercise, so the rules are stricter than a real call, not looser. Nobody goes above the cloud base alone. Nobody leaves the path to shortcut, especially on the eastern slope, where the ground is loose and where Huw, in twenty twenty-one, showed us exactly how loose, with his uh, his knee. No? Huw's laughing. Huw's allowed.

Slide 7: Safety: stricter than a real call, not looser

4:11If anyone in your team is cold, slow or quiet, you say so, and you come down, and nobody will think less of you, and anyone who does will be having a conversation with me in the car park. [sighs]

4:27Debrief is at one thirty in the hall, and there will be soup. Not good soup. Hot soup. Questions?

Slide 8: Debrief at 1:30, in the hall

4:35No? Carys, Huw, with me for the grid. Let's go and find Megan, who is, I promise you, not in the van. And somebody check the van. Just once.