Recently our teams in Northumberland, Tyne and Wear and Durham were called upon to take part in our second Mass Stranding Exercise of the week!
The event was centred on Newbiggin and was facilitated by our staff to create a detailed, immersive scenario for the volunteers to respond to. MSEs provide great opportunities for teamworking and increasing skills in communications, incident command roles and more. Attending vets were also challenged on various animal health-related issues and decisions to make as well.
Management of mass strandings can be difficult and stressful for those involved with a lot going on to try to bring under control, so having these opportunities to practice are valuable in many ways. Not only are these training sessions useful for promoting positive learning outcomes, but they also create a much better understanding of equipment and skills needs for area teams to consider and plan for should they be faced with the real thing too.
The exercise was topped off with a great debriefing session held in the nearby Newbiggin Maritime Centre and we would like to say a big thank you to the staff there for allowing us use of the room and for their ongoing support. We’d also like to thank everybody who attended the event too – once again it was another great opportunity for our staff to get out into the field to meet many of our team face to face and work alongside one another, and we’re thrilled to have heard such overwhelming positive feedback from both MSEs that we’ve run recently.
We’ve already begun thinking of the next ones for 2026, so watch this space for news on these!
“A really useful day to learn how to coordinate with a large team of people and how spread our resources the best- while in a safe environment.” – Hannah Adams
“Having not done one (MSE) before, I found it to be really useful. To experience it as a simulation helped to highlight areas we could improve up on and showed our strength as a team. Everyone said how fantastic the day was.” – Debbie
