BANGOR Gymnastics Club has raised £1,500 to have a defibrillator installed on the front of its building on Llandygai Industrial Estate.

The defibrillator, provided by Welsh Hearts, has been made available for use to all of the units on the estate, which includes Bangor Recycling Centre, Mike’s Garage and Motor Parts Direct.

The club raised part of the money itself through an online Crowdfunder page, and also received donations from parents of their gymnasts and from others on the estate.

Electrical contractors Owen & Palmer Limited, another company based on the estate, also fitted the defibrillator at the gym free of charge.

Andrew Hill, club chairman, believes the presence of a defibrillator is particularly timely given the heightened levels of stress and anxiety many have felt since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said: “I just thought it was better to have installed and make sure it’s there for somebody to use, rather than have hundreds of pounds in the bank.

“It goes to better use if it saves someone’s life. A lot of adults have been stressed during lockdown about jobs, finances, or COVID itself, and we feel they’ll all benefit from it.

“It’s an urgency to get it inside there, so we’ve been trying to do it for 12 months but with all the restrictions in place, we couldn’t even get an electrician. It’s been a bit of a nightmare, but it’s installed now, which is good.”

More than 1,000 people use the facilities at Bangor Gymnastics Club, and statistics show that if a defibrillator is used within the first minute of a victim collapsing, the survival rate can be as high as 90 per cent.

Andrew learnt the value of a defibrillator particularly after performing CPR on a cyclist, and is encouraging others on the Llandygai Industrial Estate to attend a future training session with the Red Cross.

He added: “I had to do CPR on somebody on the promenade in Colwyn Bay. He had a heart attack on his bike by the looks of it. He was unconscious and lying on the rocks.

“I kept him alive for quite some time, and then the air ambulance landed and put the impact machine on his chest to keep him going, but he passed away. That’s how important it is – if I had one of them (defibrillators), it would maybe have been a success.

“You always think to yourself: ‘What if I’d done this or that?’. I just thought it was a benefit to have it there for so many people in the area.

“There’s a lot of elderly people working on the estate and they’re going to benefit, too. It gives them peace of mind if anything happens in work.

“We’re having the Red Cross hopefully coming down to do some training for us, so we’re going to invite some of the people from the estate and see whether they can get involved, so that everyone’s trained on the estate.

“We don’t want it to be just sat there, collecting dust, with nobody knowing how to use it or thinking they don’t know how to use it.

“We want to make sure everyone understands it’s there for a reason and that if it has to be used, it can be. If it saves one person’s life, then it’s worth that £1,500.”