Largest Deployment to date

[Paul Johns]

4x4 response teams from the South have helped to dig stranded drivers from muddy fields and car parks on the Isle of Wight. Festival goers were trapped when heavy rain fell on the Isle of Wight creating huge swathes of mud which made the car parks difficult to access.

[Mario Caves]

The scale of the problem...

There were over 55,000 people at the event. On the Sunday afternoon I took the festival's carpark manager on a recce of all the fields making up the car parks, the best estimate that we came to was 2,800 cars, a large proportion of which needed assistance to get out of the mud. Many had been towed in on the Friday and left on soft ground, so had no hope of driving out.
At the peak of the extraction operation on the Sunday evening, there were over 90 Responders and nearly 30 large farm tractors deployed.
(it felt like I spent the whole weekend only using numbers that had lots of zeros on the end)

[Dave S]

Mario, your signature statement is highly appropriate in this case.