It doesn’t matter if its mid winter, with the Sierra Nevada covered in snow, or the height of summer, the Guardia Civil, mountain-rescue service, GREIM, are called out almost every weekend throughout the year.
Yes, you might argue, that’s what they train for and that’s what they are paid for, but like forest firefighters, they put their lives at risk every time they are called into action.
Anyway, let’s see what happened last weekend! The Granada-based, Grupo de Rescate e Intervención en Montaña (GREIM) and the Guardia Civil, Unidad Aérea (UAER) carried out four rescue missions; three in the province of Granada and one in the neighbouring province of Jaén
In fact, the Guardia Civil rescue helicopter based in the Base Aérea de Armilla even assisted their fellow GREIM unit in Ubrique (Cádiz) in a rescue mission.
Righ,t the first call out in our province was on Saturday the 4th around 19.00h after 112 received a call for assistance from a group of mountain runners who had become lost near the Laguna de Las Calderetas in the Sierra Nevada within the municipality of Trevélez.
Trouble was, both the rescue team and their chopper were busy ferring a paraglider flyer in the province of Jaén. So they dropped him off at the Hospital de Traumatología in the city of Granada there and rushed back to the Sierra Nevada.
There were four runners so they had to locate all four of them. Only one of them was slightly hurt but not enough, like this three companions, to require medical treatment. So they were transported to the mountain refuge, Postero Alto, in the municipality of de Jerez de Marquesado, where they had left their vehicles.
Next came a rescue the following day, Sunday, after 112 received a call from a woman who had suffered an injury in the Barranco del Tajo Cortés, in the municipality of Pórtugos. She had been practicing barranquismo (canyoneering) and had an open fracture to her tibia and fibula (shinbone and calf bone).
It wasn’t easy getting her out of the deep and narrow barranco, but they managed to reach her, immobilise her injured lower leg, put her on a stretcher and winched her out into the hovering helicopter
What made the rescue even more difficult was that the wash from the helicopter rotors was causing lose stone to fall down onto the rescuers and victim. They flew her to the heliport in Los Tablones, (Órgiva) where a Junta, air-ambulance helicopter was waiting to fly her to hospital
But it doesn’t end there because 112 received another call, this time from a woman who had been hiking in the upper area of Río Verde, (Otívar) She had started to feel ill and unable to continue as she had symptoms of heat stroke. The Guardia helicopter landed nearby to her location (probaby where paraglider flyers use as a landing area).
She was to be dehydrated, dizzy and suffering fatigue, so they treated those symptoms on the spot and then flew her to the Hospital Universitario Virgen de las Nieves (PTS) in Granada.
Editorial comment: Amazingly, people venture up into the Sierra Nevada in the winter without adequate clothing and footwear, without a torch and completely bereft of common sense, and then the summer comes and people go hiking in the hills in the middle of a heatwave and wonder why they get heatstroke! Furthermore, of those rescued last weekend, you can bet your last euro that there was at least one foreigner amongst them who thought that Andalucia sweltering under a heatwave would be just like going for a stroll in Kent in April.
(News: Sierra Nevada, Granada, Andalucia)
Keywords: Busy Weekend for Rescuers, Virgen de La Nieves, Open Fracture, Rio Verde, Barranco del Tajo Cortés, Canyoneering, Tablones, Heliport, Jerez de Marquesado, GREIM, UAER, Guardia Civil, Mountain Rescue, Rescue Helicopter
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