Lake District Mud and Flood

Aim

A veteran-led, Community Interest Company using certified safety gear to pull stranded people and vehicles out of weather based difficulty.

👤 About Me & Our Team

My name is Rob. I am an Iraq and Afghanistan combat veteran, a proud dad and grandad, and a qualified transport and logistics professional.

I am not an armchair theorist or hobbyist. My entire adult life has been defined by operating under intense pressure, maintaining absolute composure in hostile conditions, and executing strict, risk-managed logistics solutions. I have taken the precise organizational skills drilled into me by the British Armed Forces and the commercial transport sector to build a robust, independent winter road safety shield for our county.

❄️ The Spark: Our Core Idea

The blueprint for Lake District Mud & Flood was born out of cold, hard reality on a pitch-black Cumbrian road. In January, my own family found themselves stranded in a disabled car on an unlit lane on the way to Cockermouth. The temperature plummeted to a brutal -5°C. As the warmth drained from the vehicle, we found ourselves trapped for over four hours waiting for a mainstream recovery network that was completely overwhelmed by county-wide freeze calls.

I realized that when severe winter weather hits Cumbria, our vital infrastructure faces an impossible task. Mainstream breakdown patrols drive standard 2-wheel-drive vans and face strict corporate liability rules that legally prohibit them from entering standing water or navigating un-gritted fells inclines. This leaves regular commuters, healthcare workers, and families dangerously vulnerable and isolated in mobile phone dead-zones for hours.

Our idea is simple: To bridge that emergency gap. We are establishing a highly disciplined, volunteer rapid-response unit operating within a strict 1-hour radius of Workington, covering everything from the major bottlenecks of Carlisle and the A595 commuter belt to the deep flood pools of the Borrowdale Valley.

If a vehicle is stranded, we deploy to clear the lane. If the car is mechanically dead, we enforce a Welfare First protocol—extracting shivering families from the cold, loading them into a heavily heated passenger sanctuary, and delivering them to safety completely free of charge.

🗺️ Our Vision: A True Regional Safety Grid

Our long-term vision is to transform Lake District Mud & Flood into a fully sustainable, multi-vehicle regional emergency asset. We are registering this organization as a transparent, asset-locked Community Interest Company (CIC), meaning 100% of public and corporate funding is legally tied straight to community safety gear—never private profit.

As we scale up, our vision expands across two major social fronts:

The Grant Loop: 100% of future digital media surplus revenue generated by documenting our winter rescues on YouTube and TikTok will be legally funnelled into mechanical parts grants, helping low-income motorists and struggling veterans pay for vehicle repair bills at our local partner workshops.Veteran Integration: We will actively recruit, train, and deploy other military combat veterans transitioning into civilian life—utilizing their unique composure, discipline, and mechanical aptitude to scale our rescue grid across the North West.

🧮 How We Will Use the Money We Raise

We are raising a strict £3,000 core procurement budget to get our tires on the turf before the high-risk mid-September storm cycles break over the fells [2.1]. Every single penny raised on this platform is asset-locked and immediately deployed into these three critical infrastructure blocks:

• 1. Vehicle Acquisition (£2,000–£2,500): Sourcing a structurally sound, road-legal manual 4x4 utility platform (such as a Nissan Pathfinder R51) featuring a heavy-duty steel ladder-frame chassis and a selectable low-range (4LO) transfer case [2.1]. This configuration provides the 5-to-7-seat interior passenger warmth capacity, balanced weight distribution, and heavy towing prowess needed to execute safe recoveries.
• 2. The Portable Winch & Electrical Matrix (£400–£500): Installing custom front and rear 2-inch receiver hitch sleeves and a universal steel winch plate cradle. This keeps the vehicle lightweight for daily transport shifts, allowing our 12,000lb winch to be moved dynamically to either end of the truck via high-amperage Anderson quick-connect plugs and a dedicated dual-battery split-charge system.
• 3. The 5-Ton Welfare & Cargo Bay Kit (£200–£300): Procuring our onboard safety inventory. We operate under a strict engineering mandate: every strap and shackle features a certified, stamped minimum 5-tonne Working Load Limit (WLL). This fund covers our synthetic soft shackles, 8-metre static lines, high-acuity LED scene flares, heavy-duty waterproof tarpaulins for water-berm extractions, insulated hot flasks, and thermal space blankets.

We have broken zero, our blueprint is airtight, and we are ready to move. Help a veteran protect Cumbria's roads this winter. Back the truck today.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 6th October 2026 at 7:56am