We then, we then went up to a meeting in Carlisle to explain what we would be doing if we went dirty. Basically standing around with a clipboard writing down license numbers and supervising the people on and off farms making sure they were disinfected properly. There were mixed views about this meeting, some people thought that going dirty wouldn’t be so bad after all, I however nearly pulled out for other reasons, I did not see how I could be helping the situation standing around holding a clipboard. The next day I got my first job up at Gretna and I never touched a clipboard the whole 2 days I was on that farm. I spent the whole of the Friday helping to pen animals in the fields ready for the slaughter teams to come round behind us. After that I spent 2 days supervising the loading into Snowie wagons of a hundred cow dairy herd that had been dead for 5 days. Each farm is different from the handling facilities to the type of stock, whether it’s pyres burials or loading wagons. The only job description was to get all the stock slaughtered and disposed of as soon as possible. You were constantly thinking on your feet and making on the on the spot decisions. You had to do whatever was required from holding lambs for the vet to inject into the heart to lambing ewes hours before they were going to be shot, to milking cows because the calves needed feeding and they weren’t going to be shot till the next day. There were no rules to follow, which some people could cope with and others couldn’t.
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At the beginning of the following week things really changed. Two of our vets went to DEFRA one was sent to Northumbria and the other stayed within the county, our large animal work had stopped immediately and surprisingly so did the small animal work. Also during that week we lost our first client to foot and mouth. All work had ceased and we had to think seriously about what was going to happen. We found we had new roles, not easy or nice and one I found particularly hard to cope with, we had become and information bureau and counsellors overnight. Farmers were phoning for advice, some re confirmed cases, some in the contiguous cull and some just needing, desperately needing information. But all very very confused and very very upset. We sat and listened mainly, trying to get the information that they so desperately needed was hard. This took up most of our day and most of the night and a job that we were definitely not prepared for.
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Anyway the story of FMD that I got involved with here in Cumbria was that at the end of February I rang the local office and volunteered to go and help for 2 weeks on secondment at that point we had no idea how much we would be paid, how it would happen, what we were doing or anything. I went for 2 weeks I was there for 6 months, I was one of these ubiquitous ministry vets in the white boiler suits on the other side, dealing with farmers, dealing with press, and trying to argue about the policy that was being put into place by Page Street. What amazed me was the lack of preparedness that was, there didn’t seem to be the contingency planning, there didn’t seem to be the infrastructure in place to deal with an emergency. My training when I arrived consisted of “Thank goodness you are here, you serve a Form A when you arrive, you serve Form B if it’s negative and make sure you keep the carbon copies and give the top copies to the farmer”. And that was my training and I went out and started on it.