A RESCUE boat designed to save people who have fallen into a river has been given high-tech new equipment.

The York Rescue Boat charity was founded last year after a spate of deaths in the River Ouse.

Now it has been given a thermal imaging camera, normally used to locate people in smoke-logged buildings, by the Essex manufacturer ISG Infrasys.

Charity founder Dave Benson said the device was worth thousands of pounds and would be a great asset to the team.

"More importantly, it means that when people go in the river at night, we can hopefully find them straight away, so it’s a great bit of kit," he said.

”One of our trustees emailed a few businesses and they said they liked what we were doing and offered to donate a model to us.

“It’s donations like this that keep us running and obviously with a piece of equipment like this it boosts our capabilities on the water.”

ISG sales and service manager Paul Spooner said such cameras were generally used by fire services to help detect people in burning buildings.

He said the cameras could detect the heat from someone in the water as far as 30 to 40 metres away, who might not be spotted with a conventional floodlighting, allowing rescuers to move in and pull them from the river.