Thank you to the Hollick Family Foundation
A huge ‘thank you’ to the Hollick Family Foundation, which has just donated a staggering £10,000 to Kent Search and Rescue (KSAR) to help with our purchase of a replacement Incident Support Vehicle (ISV). This will make a massive difference to our biggest 2023 project, which will see the new ISV on the roads of Kent in the near future, supporting searches for high-risk vulnerable missing persons anywhere in Kent, as requested by Kent Police.
This emergency response vehicle is critical to search operations, as it carries a wide range of specialist Search and Rescue (SAR) equipment, as well as medical kit. It will also be fitted out as a multi-role unit, capable of acting as an additional mobile command hub for live operational SAR management. As a result, not only will KSAR be able to reach emergencies faster and more reliably, but the team will also be able to deploy assets needed for each incident more efficiently – hopefully finding vulnerable missing people faster and before it is too late.
KSAR’s existing ISV will next be repurposed in-house to become the incident and training vehicle for KSAR’s emergency water/flood support team, which is responsible for deploying to all emergencies involving vulnerable missing people potentially in rivers, lakes etc.
Beneficiaries are across the spectrum. Missions range from finding missing children to people in their 90s, many living with dementia, but also many others of all ages with mental health issues and/or at suicide risk. In Kent, 10,000 go missing every year: around 400 are designated high-risk, vulnerable, resulting in the potential for a KSAR call out by Kent Police. Operation Concern helps hundreds more. Adding people indirectly affected (family, friends etc, in their time of greatest need) brings people helped by KSAR to thousands.