Three Girls Rescued From Beneath Cliffs

Three teenage girls - one of them suffering from a broken leg - were rescued from beneath the cliffs at Dover on Tuesday evening.

The alarm was raised at 7.20pm when Dover Coastguard received a 999 call from three girls, one of whom had sustained a leg injury, from an unknown location on the foreshore in the Dover area.

The Dover RNLI All Weather lifeboat diverted from an exercise to search the foreshore to the west of Samphire Hoe to the foreshore west of Dover.

A rescue helicopter from Wattisham was also scrambled from an exercise to assist in the search along with Folkestone Coastguard and two members of Dover Lifeboat crew who were at Samphire Hoe.

Operations room staff at Dover Coastguard kept in touch with the casualties via mobile telephone throughout the search, with the Dover lifeboat eventually locating the casualties on rocks at the Eastern end of Samphire Hoe beneath Shakespeare cliff, west of Dover town.

The girls were checked by the paramedic from the helicopter who found all three to be mildly hypothermic and one with a fracture to the lower right leg. The helicopter crew then evacuated all three from the foreshore, and took them to the William Harvey Hospital at Ashford.