An 'old abandoned' house has been searched as part of the effort to find missing mum Nicola Bulley.
The 45-year-old disappeared on Friday morning (January 27) while making a conference call from a bench as she was walking her pet dog Willow. She was last seen at around 9.15am while walking along a footpath to a river.
A huge search has since been launched near Garstang Road in St Michael’s on Wyre in Lancashire. Police said previously there was no evidence of any criminal activity or that Nicola has been attacked.
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There are reports that Nicola had her camera off and was muted during the call she was on when she disappeared. Nicola's mobile phone was found on the bench along the river path.
Police confirmed yesterday that they had tracked down a 'potentially key witness' as part of the search operation. It is understood Nicola had dropped her two young children off at St Michael's-on-Wyre Church of England Primary School, and leaving her car parked nearby, went on the walk with spaniel Willow - something she is said to do regularly.
Kev Camplin, of Bowland Pennine Mountain Rescue, led a team of 25 trained volunteers on the day Nicola - known as Nikki - went missing, the Mirror reports. He said they scoured a long stretch of the river, including wooded areas, water margins and the grounds of a large unoccupied country house.
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 made use of equipment including a pickup truck that tows a trailer carrying floatation devices. One of their Land Rovers, which stores medical kits, broke down during the search.
All the volunteers carry mountain rescue radios and are co-ordinated by an operator inside a control van with mapping systems. Kev said the team was contacted at around midday on Friday and he was at the search site within an hour, before they left at about 8pm.
"We probably searched a mile north upstream and then we probably searched probably three miles downstream," he explained. "We covered quite a bit."
He said his team only gets 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," Kev said.
"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. He said they were joined by members of the public who wanted to help and he sent them to low-risk areas.
Then on his way back in the dark, he came across two couples with torches who were searching the riverbank. Asked if untrained volunteer searchers are a help, he said: "To be honest they get in the way because we do search professionally.
"Although we are volunteers, we have quite a rigorous training program, as you can imagine, mountain rescue, medicines, digging rescue, water rescue, crime scene, we do all that sort of training. We have various levels and depths of experience.
"Don’t get me wrong, it’s all good willing and it’s natural for family and neighbours to do. But if they’re tramping over an area we’re searching on then it’s not good because it destroys all the evidence."
Bowland Pennine Mountain Rescue is a charitable organisation, to see more or to donate click here.
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