An 'abandoned' property has been searched as part of efforts to trace a missing mum. Nicola Bulley, 45, was reported missing while walking her dog next to the River Wyre off Garstang Road, in St Michael's on Wyre on Friday 27, January.
Search teams have so far found her phone which was discovered on a bench along a river path. The mobile was still logged into a work conference call when it was found.
Bowland Pennine Mountain Rescue, led by Kev Camplin, have scoured a long stretch of the river, including wooded areas, water margins and the grounds of a large unoccupied country house in the search. Speaking to the Mirror, he said: "The abandoned house is right opposite the bench on the other side of the river, over a 10ft garden wall. It’s quite posh.
"We didn’t go into the house, as a volunteer search and rescue team we don’t actually go into buildings. We might go into a barn or something. We leave that to the police. While the team was searching the grounds, the owner was there for some reason, and we asked him to go in and he had a quick look around and she wasn’t there."
The team launched their search at around midday on Friday but stood down around 8 pm. He continued: "We probably searched a mile north upstream and then we probably searched probably three miles downstream.
"We covered quite a bit."
Kev says that his team are only called out to 'high risk' cases that are not considered dangerous; for example, suspected criminals on the run. "We only go to despondents, and suicidal cases and people with dementia - and people who are generally lost," he said.
Nicola lives in Inskip, about three miles from where she went walking. "She drops her kids off at St Michaels and then apparently she walks eastwards to where the woods and the river are, she walks that daily with her dog," said Kev.
"So it’s not an unknown area for her, and it is a popular area for walkers and dog walkers alike. It’s actually quite a beautiful spot.
"Leaving the phone on the bench and then disappearing it is quite odd. We don’t normally get that," he continued.
"Sometimes we go to a search, classed as lowland search. You do get a car… where somebody has left their car. That’s the initial planning point.
"But her car was at the school and her phone was the initial planning point. Later we find out she was on a team's work call. We didn’t know that on Friday. I knew the phone was there, but not on a work call."
He said once his team had covered the specified areas they've identified, there's not much more they can do. "We probably did more than we normally do because of the circumstances. We put the extra miles in, the distances in. But once we’ve done our areas there’s no need to really stay so we just pack up and go," he explained.
The team has since been 'on call', knowing they may get mobilised by police later in the search.
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