BOLTON Mountain Rescue team had a busy New Year's Eve providing back-up for the ambulance service.

The team of volunteers was called out to help deal with 12 incidents over a 17-hour period, from lunchtime on New Year's Eve to the early hours of New Year's Day.

It was three times the number of callouts the team received when it first started supporting the ambulance service on New Year's Eve, 1999. And the latest New Year callouts amounted to more than 10 per cent of the total number of calls the team received during last year.

Thirteen team members were "on the road", travelling between incidents and hospitals in Bolton, Horwich, Leigh and Wigan in three specially-equipped Land Rovers and an ambulance minibus.

Cases they attended included drugs overdoses, an asthma attack, drunkenness, slips and falls, a broken arm and an angina attack. In theory, they are just asked to deal with low grade emergency calls.

Team leader Garry Rhodes said: "Since 1999 we have been asked by the ambulance service to help them on New Year's Eve because they get swamped with 999 calls. I think our 12 calls was about as much as we could handle."

The team set up a control room manned by a five-strong crew at their Overdale base in Chorley New Road. The ambulance service passed on calls to them and the crew dispatched team vehicles to incidents.

The night was so busy the team had to send vehicles straight to incidents from the Royal Bolton Hospital after they had dropped off casualties.

When the team started the New Year's Eve Service in 1999 they had four callouts from the ambulance service.

Over the last few months, team members have undergone special training to prepare them for the New Year's operation and their vehicles were equipped with some of the medical equipment normally found in ambulances, including defibrillators, oxygen, pain-killing gas and a range of splints.

As the clock struck midnight, the team had vehicles stationed in Bury and Wigan town centres in case there were any emergencies in those towns.

The team is normally called to incidents where it is difficult for ambulance crews to reach casualties. They cover a wide area which includes moorlands to the north of Bolton and Bury.

, and to the south of Blackburn.

in addition to the entire western part of Greater Manchester, parts of Cheshire and the southern parts of Lancashire. Mr Rhodes said: "We are used to working as a team and usually there are at least 15 people at any one incident. But on New Year's Eve it was different because we were working in twos, threes and fives, so there was more individual responsibility."