COASTGUARD teams and lifeboat crews from Ceredigion have taken part in a major two-day exercise testing the emergency services’ response to flooding.

HM Coastguard volunteers from Aberystwyth, Borth, New Quay and Gwbert, as well as an Aberystwyth RNLI lifeboat volunteer who is part of the national RNLI Flood Rescue Team, spent Tuesday, 12 and Wednesday, 13 April, taking part in Exercise Polygon, the largest multi-agency exercise of its kind in Wales this year.

In all, 250 personnel from 15 org­anisations which make up the Joint Emergency Services Group participated, including fire and rescue, police, ambulance, mountain rescue, the RSPCA and Natural Resources Wales.

There were different scenarios set for the exercise, including people trapped in homes in a flooded Cardiff, concerns over high water levels at the Pontsticill dam above Merthyr Tydfil, reports of a partially submerged caravan and a person trapped under a horse in the mud with the tide rising.

HM Coastguard senior coastal operations officer Lee Crumpler, who is from Borth, said: “The exercise was to test how services would respond to flooding in Wales and the local coastguards got to practice multi-agency response work with other teams who they might not have worked with before."

See this week’s south editions for the full story, in shops and online tomorrow