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Helping Hampshire’s Search & Rescue Heroes
Hampshire Search and Rescue is one of the latest voluntary organisations to receive a donation from the ExxonMobil VIP scheme. £500 was awarded to the charity, which works alongside Hampshire police in searching for vulnerable high risk missing persons in the county. The team has been called out 30 times so far this year and the donation will go towards new lifejackets for river bank searching.
Jonathan Dann, marine superintendent & deputy PFSO at Fawley Marine Terminal joined the 120 -strong search and rescue team as a volunteer after qualifying in October 2019. He has worked for ExxonMobil for the past 22 years, and now spends his time off as a volunteer search technician ready to respond to searches across Hampshire’s countryside, open land, woodlands, river courses and urban areas.
“As a search technician, we are essentially the foot soldiers of search and rescue,” Jonathan says. “It takes us between six and twelve months to train to a nationally recognised standard. When called out, we are under the command of a police search advisor and deployed to the area where the missing person was last seen. I volunteer on my days off, which are plenty as I am a shift worker,” he adds.
During the past year, the Hampshire Search and Rescue team has also assisted Hampshire’s COVID-19 Resilience Forum. As the pandemic emerged last year, the team helped to store and deliver PPE to healthcare and community locations including hospitals, GP surgeries and nursing homes. “We delivered 1 million items in support of Portsmouth City Council and the NHS over a four-month period,” says Jonathan.
But his volunteering didn’t stop there. Last Christmas, while the media was focusing on truckers being stranded at Dover Docks due to COVID and Brexit issues, the Hampshire Search and Rescue team were called upon to help keep Portsmouth International Port open. Jonathan explains: “We were asked to use our medical training to help test the lorry drivers for COVID-19. Following online training, we qualified to do lateral flow testing, and were deployed at the port for six days, 24 hours a day over Christmas and New Year, covering every ferry sailing to French ports. More recently, we’ve also been supporting the vaccination roll-out, assisting at the mass vaccination centres in Southampton, Basingstoke and Portsmouth,” he adds.
Jonathan clearly enjoys his volunteering and urges his ExxonMobil colleagues to consider it too. He says: “Volunteering can take many forms and you are provided with some great training opportunities. I would encourage my ExxonMobil colleagues to consider getting involved or to do a challenge to help us raise the £30,000 needed each year to keep the Hampshire Search and Rescue Service going.”
Email Jonathan at jonathan.c.dann@exxonmobil.com to find out more.
Also in this issue
Remediation works are set to begin at Bowling
Preparation and construction works are due to start this month (May) at a significant former industrial site in Bowling near Glasgow after a year-long delay due to COVID-19. As part of the land sale agreement, ExxonMobil will remediate the site, which was previously home to an Esso oil terminal. The land is now part of the Glasgow City Region Deal project and will be transformed by the buyer into a major industrial and commercial development and bypass.
FAST – preserving the future
Although Fawley’s FAST project has been temporarily postponed, work continues at pace to ensure the project is well placed upon restart. Newsline has spoken to Yuri Cordy, project manager to discover what’s been happening to store and preserve the equipment already procured.
Fawley prepares for 70th anniversary celebrations
Preparations are underway to mark the 70th anniversary of the ‘new’ refinery at Fawley in September. Newsline spoke to Alison Jones, Fawley community manager, who is helping to co-ordinate the celebrations with Fawley’s Behaviours and Culture team.
“Everything at Fawley has 70th anniversary branding this year,” says Alison. “The 10 large information boards displayed in Fawley’s conference centre are being upgraded to mark the anniversary and digital signage is being used across the site. New photographs have been commissioned to hang throughout the administration building too.
EMBRACE – it’s time to talk
Conversations about race can sometimes feel uncomfortable – but that’s no reason not to speak out. Newsline recently spoke with Bhonae Tayali, EMIT digital support advisor, of the EMBRACE Network about its latest activities, which seek to show why we must actively listen, learn and talk about the experiences of our colleagues from ethnic minority backgrounds, in order to live out the ExxonMobil value of being inclusive.
