Gorge Rescue
The Gorge Rescue team was a mix of staff from the Police and National Parks. They were trained every 2 or 3 months by Inspector Johnny Johnson who came from Binga were he was M i/c . They used basic abseiling techniques (dülfersitz method) where the rope is wound under the leg, across the chest, over the shoulder, across the back, under the arm pit and gripped in the hand.
The friction was quite sore and trashed your shirt! We put a towel between the shoulder and shirt to reduce the pain. These days this is considered quite dangerous and only used in emergencies when you have no modern abseiling kit. We also had a Swiss made tripod which we used to lower a stretcher over the lip of the gorge with a rescuer attached to the stretcher to guide it down and recover the casualty. That worked really well. Once a year, an officer came up from Salisbury to check on all the gear to make sure it was still serviceable. He was an experienced mountaineer - name unknown. During my time we only had cause to use it once and that was to rescue survivors and retrieve bodies of municipal workers from a drain where they had been working and were overcome by some noxious gas.
Details provided by 8115 Nigel Leakey