Here guys you're gonna love this one, I've never come across anything like it!
At a recent drill in the smoke house using simulated smoke, one of the RDS (this isn't RDS baiting because I'm one of them too) who was BA team leader returned to the ECP with his buddy and a casualty dummy and began to report what progress he'd made, rooms and doors found etc, you know the score.
Standing at the ECP as observer I could see the confusion on the face of the ECO and listened harder as the BA team leader repeated his explanation. I sidled over to the instructor that had been tailing the crew but he said he was as confused as the ECO and couldn't be sure of exactly what they'd done because visibility inside was zero.
Later at the exercise debrief the subject of that BA teams progress came up again with another team saying there was confusion because they had come head to head with the mystery team where they couldn't have done according to the plan created by the ECO. The IC looked even more lost as he was getting the confusing version of events from the Sector Commander BA who also couldn't figure out what the hell had happened.
Before admitting that the information available made it impossible to accurately debrief the exercise, myself and another instructor decided to go back in to the structure with the BA team and ask them to retrace their steps as best they could remember. The team had been briefed to carry out a right hand search of the first floor so we began our retrace at the top of the stairs. Immediately the team leader took a turn to the left, AH! we cried in unison, "we asked you to confirm that you'd done a right hand search and you said yes, but clearly you are on a left hand search!"
"No no no," he replied, "I was on a right hand search, like this.."
He then proceeded in total seriousness how he carried out a right hand search by placing his right arm across his body and contacting the reference wall indeed with his right hand but bent across to his left hand side, absolutely unbelievable!
To have gone through the entire exercise without realising his mistake, his buddy sensing something was wrong or likewise the instructor, I cannot comprehend. To cap it all this fellar has been in the job for over twenty years, staggering!!
