Gnowangerup local Peter Blows has been volunteering with the State Emergency Services for more than 30 years, and recalled some of his most memorable rescues in honour of National Volunteer Week.

Mr Blows joined the Gnowangerup SES in 1993 and has spent the past 34 years helping people around the region.

Much of his work has been in the Stirling Ranges, home to Bluff Knoll, the popular hiking and climbing spot notorious for the number of rescues required on its tracks every year.

Mr Blows’ volunteering days started young, helping out around the Gnowangerup Football Club. He said giving back to his community was something he had endeavoured to keep doing throughout his life in one way or another.

“Originally, I thought I would just join the emergency services as a volunteer for a couple of years, give back to the community a bit,” he said.

Then my daughter had an accident at home and we needed assistance from other volunteers, and I thought, ‘I’m not giving this up, I need to give back to them’, so 33 years later, here I am still volunteering

“When I first started with the SES I was young and fit, so I was going up the mountain for rescues, but as I’m getting older now I tend to spend more time in the carpark at the start of an incident.”

Mr Blows’ experience conducting rescues in the Stirling Ranges, particularly on Bluff Knoll, has been instrumental in safely and efficiently conducting dozens of rescues on the notorious peak.

However, one of the rescues that has stuck with him over the years happened only a year after he joined the crew.

“There was a gentleman in 1994 who was stuck up on the watercourse,” he said.

“He was there for two days because he didn’t know how to call for help.

“He called his family in England, who were then able to call back to Australia and get help, and the climbers up on the mountain were feeding us information back about where they could hear him and where they couldn’t, and I knew straight away that he was up the watercourse.

“As soon as I got permission to go up, I went straight to the watercourse and found him.

“Finding someone on the mountain is always a real buzz, finding someone who is in trouble and telling them that you’re going to be able to help them — what an experience.

“Once you get them back down to the carpark, you hand over to St John, you sit back and go ‘wow, look what I’ve just done, look what we’ve done as a team’.

“There’s a debrief afterwards, lots of pats on the back, and then you go through whether there was anything you did wrong or anything you could do better.

“But there is a buzz that stays with you after a successful rescue — when you get home you don’t sleep, there’s too much adrenaline.”

Mr Blows said new technology is changing the way rescues are conducted by the SES, with the help of drones, digital navigation tools and better communication making it easier and safer for volunteers.

“The rescues have changed a lot over the years,” he said. “The technology we have access to now, like using drones for navigation where it used to be mainly maps and compasses, has changed things.

“New phones are helping so much now too, because the precise location the phone gives off can lead us straight to where they are, so we always tell people to stay where they are and we can come straight to them.

“The modern equipment makes a huge difference — a rescue on Bluff Knoll takes half the time now than it used to.”

Mr Blows said one of the highlights of his volunteer work these days is the SES’ cadet program, which helps young people start volunteering or careers with the emergency services.

“We run the cadet program through schools and within the unit, and the modern child now has to do so much on computers, so much looking at screens, so I thought, ‘why don’t we try and get them out of the room, off the screen, show them what we do’,” he said.

“When I joined we had the odd cadet in the unit, but the schools program has been running for about three years, we started with four or five kids, and we now have 29.”

National Volunteer Week runs from May 18 to 24, and Mr Blows said anyone considering volunteering should go for it.

“Volunteering can start small, anything you are able to give can make a difference,” he said.

“Just do what you can — even if you think it’s a small thing, just do it, the buzz you’ll get from helping people is so great.

“Volunteering really keeps a small country town going.

“It’s so important, and not just the SES or emergency services, it could be anything in the community.

“Those small acts are what’s needed to keep our regional communities going.”