Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page.

I am a member of Surrey Search & Rescue, a Lowland Rescue team in the UK. Search and Rescue teams are called out by the emergency services when someone is in dire need of specialist help. We are a team of unpaid, trained, professionals who give up our time to help these people in need. In 2015, we responded on average to between 1 and 2 callouts per week, and between our team members they gave almost 15,000 hours of their time.

Our organisation has the skills to tackle a wide variety of scenarios, and one of these is search, rescue, and recovery from water. Working in water is the most dangerous thing we can be called upon to do (in 2015, 321 people died in accidental drownings in the UK) so we are always looking at ways to reduce risk to team members. We do this using very high levels of training, specialist boats and personal safety equipment, and more recently by using drones.

The use of drones in the air allows us to survey an area and closely examine dangerous situations without putting a team member in danger. We want to expand this capability to both in and underneath the water through the use of water based drones (also known as ROVs, Remotely Operated Vehicles). We are raising money to purchase an ROV which will allow us to safely and rapidly explore underwater in rivers and lakes. We will use this to reduce the time between arriving on scene at an incident and getting eyes in and under the water to find the missing person.