Where rescuers train for the toughest crashes

At a site near Cheadle in the Staffordshire Moorlands, Michael Maybin believes his company trains two-thirds of emergency service workers across the UK in accident response.

The co-founder of IRRTC Rescue spent time in the Army as a medic, the NHS and in the fire and rescue service as a responder, and says the training he received was not always as comprehensive as it should have been.

"We did some of this training in the service that I was in, but not to this level."

He said that the training was key to "exposing operational personnel" so that they are ready for the worst situations when they arrive.

"No two incidents are going to be the same. A situation will dictate, location, environment, circumstance, weather all those factors will come into it."

"The casualty dictates the rescue plan, and that's what we factor into our training. With heavy goods vehicles, they're bigger, they're heavier - there are way more challenges and risks."

The former service worker helped to set up the business in 2017 alongside co-founder Neil Pedersen in the hope of giving in-depth training in vehicle extractions.

"There's a lot of myths to debunk, a lot of bad habits to undo," Maybin said.

He hopes that the detail and techniques passed on ensure that all rescue workers that come to the centre have a "gold standard" of training that they can adapt to all scenarios.

Connor Higgins is a watch commander in a special rescue team for the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service.

As part of that team, he responds to various levels of incidents including the most serious.

"We need to keep them skills fresh, and vehicles change with technology, so we need to make sure we keep up with that."

Dealing with EV's is becoming an increasing challenge for Higgins and his team, and by completing the training he is learning new ways of dealing with the ever-increasing technology involved in dealing with roadside collisions.

"No two road traffic collisions are the same but the skills that we learn here today, give us the foundation of the skills and knowledge to manage any incident."

The rescue workers spent a week at the facility, during which they started on smaller lorries and eventually worked up to dealing with a 44-tonne vehicle hauling construction machinery.

In that time, they learned how to correctly hoist simulated victims out using A-frames, how to make extra space in a lorry cab by completing a dash displacement and lifting loaded HGVs safely - all techniques they could need in real-life rescue scenarios.

According to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government's most recent fire and rescue incident statistics, between January and March 2026 Staffordshire teams attended 193 road traffic collisions.

Across England in the same period, fire and rescue teams completed 802 extrications, where a casualty is physically trapped in a wreckage, and 499 releases, where a victim is not pinned inside but minor structural obstacles still need to be removed so that they may walk or be assisted out.

For Higgins, it was scenarios like these that enticed him to to leave a career in science behind and become a rescuer.

"It's extremely rewarding. When things go wrong, someone has to go and assist and that's us - that's a nice feeling."

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