Two fishermen have been rescued from a mangrove swamp by local police using quad bikes.
A father and son fishermen team found themselves stranded in a mangrove swamp near Karratha in North West Australia. “Mangrove” is a catch-all term for the dense, knotty trees, with thick roots, which thrive on salt water in coastal wetland. The police managed to rescue the two men, once the tide had receded, but only by using quad bikes, the most suitable vehicles for negotiating this hazardous terrain.
Quad bikes tend usually to be associated with serious off-road fun: tearing, bumping, or both, around rough and ready tracks, maybe at a club event or a corporate team-building day. However, quad bikes are more versatile than we might first think. They have common agricultural uses, but can also play a vital role in emergency and rescue operations.
Closer to home, and in a very different climate, quad bikes came in to their own during the bitter winter of 2010, when snow wreaked havoc across the UK. In Rankinson, Ayrshire, a group of young men, dubbed the “Quad Squad” by their appreciative community, came to the rescue of motorists and other villagers.
They towed motorists, stuck in deep snow, to safety brought food to snowed-in villagers, and helped keep the roads passable: all on their quad bikes, once again highlighting the versatility of these remarkable vehicles.
As quad bikes are put to such increasingly diverse uses, quad bike retailers have proved more than up to the job, offering a wide range of stock which reflects the amazing flexibility of the modern ATV.