'We've spent four decades helping those in crisis'

Andrew (left) and Steve (right) have spent most of their lives volunteering

Two friends are being celebrated for collectively dedicating more than 80 years to volunteer work.

Steve Buxton, 70, and Andrew Farrar, 57, are part of the British Red Cross emergency response team in Nottinghamshire which is celebrating 30 years of service this year.

The team of volunteers support emergency services at house fires, flooding and extreme weather events.

Andrew said: "I will volunteer for the Red Cross while there is a breath left in me, it's a part of me and I would never have it any other way."

'Challenging task'

Andrew joined the Red Cross as a cadet aged 14, and has since worked all over the world with the charity.

"I knew I wanted to go into the caring profession and I was attracted to the organisation based on its principles and what it stood for," he said.

Andrew said he was one of the people who responded to the tsunami in the Indian ocean on Boxing Day 2004.

Not long after he started to volunteer with the charity, he also worked with a team of people on the Kegworth air disaster.

In 1989 a Boeing 737 crashed on the M1 motorway near East Midlands Airport, killing 47 people.

"At that time I was quite young," he said.

"We were brought in to provide support to people who were held in the survivors reception centre and also supporting relatives when they arrived in the country from Ireland.

"It was a very challenging task, but it was rewarding in a sense that you could address the initial impact of that crisis on those individuals and we were able to make their worst day, their worst nightmare that little bit more manageable."

Andrew has been volunteering with the Red Cross since he was 14

One of Andrew's other most memorable events was the discovery of an unexploded World War Two bomb in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, in 1994.

"Quite a considerable amount of the community had to be evacuated to a rest centre, we were deployed to run it, which we thought was initially for a couple of hours, that turned into 72," he said.

Andrew and his team provided people with everything from tea and coffee to toothpaste and blankets.

"Somebody once said to me, if they cut me down the middle, I'd be like a Blackpool stick of rock, it would say 'Red Cross' all the way through me," he said.

Andrew has worked with the Red Cross all over the world

It is a sentiment echoed by his friend Steve Buxton who has volunteered for the charity for more than four decades.

After joining in 1984, Steve's first emergency response was in 1987 for the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster when a passenger ferry capsized and killed 187 people off the coast of Zeebrugge, Belgium.

"My colleague and I went to pick up a family who had been involved in the disaster - two parents and a nine-year-old daughter who obviously were quite traumatised.

"We got to know the family very well during the journey, we built quite a relationship and I think it helped them to start their recovery," he said.

Steve started volunteering for the Red Cross in 1984

One of the moments that still moves Steve happened during an extreme winter in Nottinghamshire, when snow caused widespread power cuts and water shortages.

"There were about 40 or 50 people stuck at Trowell services on the M1, the motorway was closed, the services were running on very low emergency power and these people were stuck for the night.

"We took our Land Rover and supplied 50 blankets for them to at least settle down for the night and we got a round of applause and a cheer as we left," he said.

The Nottinghamshire emergency response team supports emergency services in extreme weather

Steve said moments like this were the ones that kept him going.

"When you have been to help someone and you know that when you leave they are in a better place than when you arrived that gives you a great deal of satisfaction and it gives you the encouragement to carry on doing it," he said.

The 70-year-old has already retired from his job in the building industry but said he had no plans to stop volunteering "until they decide to get rid of me".