Pete Roberts recently stood down as an operational member of Northumberland National Park Mountain Rescue Team (NNPMRT) after 50 years of active service. In that time he held a variety of key roles and has been Team Leader twice. In the late 1980’s he co-authored the idea of Critical Separation, Critical Distance and Purposeful Wandering; search tactics that were first used extensively in the aftermath of Lockerbie. Recent work has linked these concepts to Search Theory and search in the initial response phase of an incident.
In 1998 he co-founded The Centre for Search Research (TCSR), a UK based registered charity, and has co-authored conference papers and the UK Missing Person Behaviour Study which are all available at www.tcsr.org.uk .
As an ex Duty Controller for NNPMRT he has extensive knowledge and experience of managing Search and Rescue (SAR) Incidents and has presented on the subject at SAR conferences throughout the UK, Ireland, Iceland, New Zealand, US and Canada. In 2000 TCSR, in collaboration with ERI International, identified the crucial period of the first 12 hours of an incident and taught the first ever Initial Response course using the Six Step Process – the ‘Initial Response’ has since become accepted terminology within the SAR world.
Pete was recently awarded the Distinguished Service Award from (MREW) Mountain Rescue (England & Wales) and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the UK Police National Search Centre.