Windy Tops

  • Clarity on not charging for Search and Rescue in New Zealand

    This incident occurred just over a week ago, but I’ve avoided posting until now. I was annoyed when I first saw it, and still am, but not for the same reason as most other people who have expressed their brief opinions in the comment thread below that article.

    A man activated a Personal Locator Beacon (PLB), sometimes called an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB), whilst tramping in the Paringa Forest area of South Westland [map], and a helicopter collected him. The pilot later reported the man as having said “he had significantly underestimated the amount of time to get out of the area and was struggling with the challenging terrain”. This has become a media article with a headline that complains about the rescue helicopter being treated as a taxi service, and begins with a claim, not clearly substantiated by other information, which asserts the man was “running late and wanted a ride to his car”. Now, the Rescue Coordination Centre of New Zealand (RCCNZ), a sub-section of Maritime New Zealand, is “considering” whether to charge the man, threatening a possible penalty of up to $30,000.

    A carbon copied story has been replicated throughout the Fairfax eco-system of newspapers and websites within New Zealand and Australia. The Herald has an identical take. It’s identical because the journalists on all sides are merely parroting a Friday press release from the RCCNZ, including the headline and opening paragraph. [Update 12-June-2013: The RCCNZ has now cleared the man of any wrongdoing with regard to activating the PLB.]

    I’m disappointed with this press release and its inflammatory tone. The facts are not established beyond hearsay, and if Maritime New Zealand truly does plan to take the matter to court, I don’t think it should be spreading such things in the media. Thanks also to the one-sided nature of the text, comment threads on those media repetitions which host them are mostly one-dimensional hang’em brigades. Based on the press release they scream that the man is an idiot, and that he should be heavily charged for the rescue. If it’s enough to indicate that there may be another side to this story, however, the Nelson Mail’s rendition of the story (from the man’s home town) attracted a comment from a person who claims to know the man and the circumstances, and believes the RCCNZ’s information to be sensationalised.

    PERCEPTION OF COSTS

    Charging a person for search and rescue in the back-country is not easy under New Zealand law. It’s also unprecedented. One of the most important reasons is that if people are dissuaded from requesting a rescue when they need it, the situation can become much worse, and risk can increase for all involved.
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  • My submission about increasing maximum penalties on the Conservation Estate

    I’ve finally put my submission in for the Conservation (Natural Heritage Protection) Bill, which (if successful) will increase maximum penalties available for many crimes on the Conservation Estate by about ten-fold. Often this will be good. For example, judges have commented on the frustration with the low penalties they’ve been restricted to when sentencing international criminals who’ve been caught smuggling out protected wildlife for sale on the black market. Enabling a higher penalty will increase the risk, set a much higher black market price on our wildlife, and hopefully make the practice less common. The Bill has cross-party support for these types of reasons, and will most likely enter law. You can read everything they said about it when it had its first day in parliament over here.

    My main concern is that the existing indirectly-specified $10,000/1-year-jail penalty for entering “closed” Conservation Areas was already disproportionate and inconsistent with the $500 fine for a nearly identical National Park situation. Following the Bill, that inconsistency will be magnified to a $100,000/2-year-jail penalty compared with a $5,000 fine. This is part of what I discussed in my earlier post regarding DoC and the word “closed”.

    The Bill is now at the stage of receiving public submissions, which will be considered by the Local Government and Environment Select Committee (a selected committee of sitting MPs) to make recommendations for any changes to the Bill before it’s sent back to Parliament to be voted on again. If you’d like to make a submission, which can be as short or lengthy, formal or informal as you like, and you don’t have to agree with me, the closing date for submissions is February 28th 2013. A submission can be completed online by visiting Parliament’s status page for the Bill, clicking the Make a Submission link on the right hand side (it links to here), scrolling to the end of the page and following the instructions to make an online submission.

    Anyway, I’ve included the text of my submission below.
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  • The entry restrictions of Matiu/Somes Island

    My previous post criticised some aspects of closed public land, and how DoC sometimes handles it, and so I found it interesting to read a report on Tuesday of DoC rangers being verbally abused in a comparable scenario. It occurred after they instructed two divers to immediately leave the shore of Matiu/Somes Island, in the middle of Wellington Harbour, and return to sea. To be clear, this is not the type of land closure I referred to in my previous post. It happened in a Reserve rather than a National Park or Conservation Area, and the land is legally closed (except for entry under strict entry rules) for reasons appropriate for the purpose of the reserve.

    The highest concern here with people landing uncontrolled on the edge of this island is a biosecurity concern for the Scientific Reserve, whereby unwanted pests could enter the island and wreak havoc amongst its local eco-systems that rely on the island’s status for their protection. Scientific Reserves are specifically set aside “for the purpose of protecting and preserving in perpetuity for scientific study, research, education, and the benefit of the country, ecological associations, plant or animal communities, types of soil, geomorphological phenomena, and like matters of special interest”. (That’s from section 21 of the Reserves Act.)
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  • A Brief Question: Public Land Access Rights and DoC

    The introduction below was an opinion piece thefor the November 2012 Federated Mountain Clubs Bulletin. With permission I’m republishing it, plus extra content that includes legal references and various opinions of my own. Please be mindful that nothing here is legal advice. I’m trying to learn about this and be accurate from my own research but would appreciate notification of any errors so I can correct them. As always, constructive discussion is welcome.

    Introduction [from Pages 40-41 of FMC Bulletin 190 (November 2012)]


    No it isn’t.

    We often take for granted our freedom to access public land, and over time I’ve encountered confusion about what’s meant when DoC labels places as “closed”. Some people ignore such directives, confident that reasons are often trivial and they’re not enforceable. Others would avoid a “closed” place, believing there’s likely a good reason, or through fear of being caught breaking rules.

    My layperson’s reading of the law (and I welcome correction) is that it emphasises the importance of free access to public land. DoC is not automatically permitted to close access to anything except specific maintained facilities like huts and bridges. Closing access within National Parks and Conservation Areas (including Forest Parks) requires the Minister of Conservation, although the Minister has confirmed a current ongoing delegation to DoC’s Director-General, who has further delegated this authority to Area Managers and Conservators. If part of a Conservation Area is “closed” under Section 13 of the Conservation Act, DoC must advertise the closure, and entering becomes an offence with a penalty of up to a year in jail or up to a $10,000 fine. Access restrictions within National Parks require the Minister to create a bylaw, which can’t be delegated away and which must be consistent with the park’s Management Plan. A person entering could potentially be fined up to $500. Severe penalties are unlikely, but the fact that it could happen is meant to convince us to avoid “closed” places.

    Despite these provisions, the law’s tone is that restricting access is serious and genuine closure of public land shouldn’t be easy, which is consistent with a view that DoC is a caretaker and not a gatekeeper. How, then, is a term which represents an offence used by DoC so frequently? Often the “closed” label is applied for discontinued maintenance, or a heightened risk for certain classes of visitors but not for everyone. It’s also commonly attached to tracks, as if they’re facilities which define where we may go rather than impressions on the land of where we have been. “Closing” a track makes little sense to someone who’d happily tread on public land alongside it, but referring to a track as “closed” may still impart to the less initiated that entry to the land beyond, or to any non-tracked land, is illegal. In most if not all cases it seems unlikely that closure is official, but with official looking signs, alerts and press releases being used by DoC to communicate about such “closures”, how can we know the difference?
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  • Feather-weight safety protocols

    As I was writing that previous post about how PLBs aren’t automatically everything that they’re sometimes made out to be, an incident was unfolding in the Tararua Range where a PLB would probably have been really really useful. Fortunately things worked out well, with a high portion of luck, as reported by TVNZ (including a video), via Stuff, and the NZ Herald. Wellington LandSAR, one of several LandSAR groups to be called in to help, also put out a press release.

    In short, a mountain runner entered the range at Holdsworth Lodge on Saturday with the reported intent of running around the Holdsworth/Jumbo circuit. He didn’t, instead changing his mind to run up the Baldy Track to South King, and presumably then around the Broken Axe Pinnacles, back past McGregor and Angle Knob, and back to the original circuit. This is a significantly longer and more remote route by comparison, on which he’d have been likely to meet fewer (if any) people depending on the conditions. If you want to check this all on a map, start about here and then scroll around.

    As it happened, he became completely disoriented on South King. When standing on a high point with cloud in all directions, he probably thought he’d turned around to go back the way from which he’d come. Instead, however, he was following the complete opposite direction into Dorset Creek on the other side, and into an even more remote part of the range. He sheltered for Saturday night under an improvised rock bivy, somehow then made his way along Dorset Creek into the Waiohine River, breaking a toe in the process and “having a particularly nasty experience in the river where he went under”. Upon noticing an orange track marker he eventually found Mid-Waiohine Hut some time after 2pm on Sunday after much hunting around in heavy rain, at which point he was finally able to determine where he was.

    He left a note for possible searchers, started a fire and ate half a jar of peanut butter that had been fortuitously left behind by someone. By now it was Monday and the first helicopter had finally been able to fly in, having previously been restricted by weather. The note was discovered, and soon after the man was spotted and collected, climbing up the track towards Isabelle and back to Mt Holdsworth. Meanwhile, multiple teams of searchers had started by scouring other parts of the range, based on information that he’d intended to run the Holdsworth/Jumbo circuit. With his decision to deviate from the route, it’s no wonder that the man wasn’t found on Sunday.
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  • PLBs and Media

    Lately there’s been an obvious promotional push from Police, the RCCNZ and SAR officials to tell people to carry PLBs (Personal Locator Beacon) when they visit the outdoors. This makes sense as a progressive way to be able to indicate distress, but I’ve found it interesting to watch how the message is injected into the media machine.

    It’s now standard, in a New Zealand media article about a back-country search and/or rescue, to see a comment about whether or not a person is believed to be carrying an emergency beacon. For better or worse, those who aren’t are often criticised as if they should be. The latest story to be pushed into the press is this one, repeated in several media outlets, which uses a recent incident in Milford Sound as an excuse to advise everyone to carry beacons. Browsing the comment thread under the above-linked article, the initially expressed public opinions mostly seem to be one-dimensional about how great and useful beacons are and how people are idiots not to carry them. Until the second wave of responding comments from readers, there was no acknowledgement that a PLB is effectively an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff which transmits no message except “fly a helicopter here to find out what my problem is”.
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  • A New Trusted Contact Service for Outdoor Safety in New Zealand

    About a year ago, DoC announced that it was pulling out of the business of taking intentions for visitors to New Zealand’s back-country. It was only ever doing so inconsistently anyway, through ad-hoc arrangements at various visitor centres, but the announcement still created controversy. One way or another, all of the nominated alternatives (encapsulated by directing people to the AdventureSmart website) required people to have their own trusted contacts.

    For a New Zealand local, arranging a trusted contact is generally manageable. People here know other people here, and those people are generally in the same time zone, speak the same language, know the important phone numbers, and are usually familiar with New Zealand’s systems, conditions and expectations. For visitors to New Zealand, however, finding trusted contacts is often not so easy, especially for visitors who simply don’t know someone who can be trusted to reliably report if they don’t return on time. Some visitors don’t even realise how important it is to have a trusted contact.

    I’m perfectly happy with DoC not being in the business of taking people’s intentions. It’s a very time consuming and expensive thing to do, especially when many of those people were never bothering to properly sign out, resulting in needless efforts to chase up and ensure they’d safely exited. It’s never been a clear statutory requirement for DoC to look after people in this way. Nevertheless, the fact that the staff of some DoC offices in touristy places have been acting as trusted contacts until recently has ensured more reliable oversight for some people visiting the outdoors than would otherwise have existed.

    A year ago I wondered if there might be room for a business to set up for taking and managing people’s intentions as a trusted contact. Very happily, it seems that someone else had a similar idea, and actually acted on it. This afternoon a random press release popped out, from a company/website called Safety Outdoors.

    According to its press release, the Safety Outdoors service, due to launch tomorrow (Thursday) and accessible via http://www.safetyoutdoors.com, will allow people to sign up for a trusted contact as a service, with a fee per activity. [Edit 9-Dec-2012: It seems to be taking longer than advertised for the SafetyOutdoors website to get underway. Meanwhile, you could also check out Adventure Buddy, which is an alternative (and free) service which is also now available.]

    From the Safety Outdoors press release:
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  • Check Out FMC Bulletin Number 190

    A Track Closed sign in the Eastern Tararau Range.
    A Track Closed sign in the Eastern
    Tararua Range. Photo: Craig McGregor.

    If you have access to the November 2012 copy of the Federated Mountain Clubs Bulletin Number 190, please take a look at pages 40-41 on which I have a small opinion piece.

    In it, I discuss a creeping issue which I think exists with the Department of Conservation’s tendency to declare places as ‘closed’, after which it’s legally ambiguous and often misleading as to whether they’re actually closed or not. I don’t want to under-cut the FMC Bulletin’s distribution by posting it here immediately, but once it’s had a reasonable chance to get around, I’ll re-post it here with much more elaboration on the issue and the laws involved.

    I’m ultimately hoping to provoke a discussion about this. As much as I enjoy people commenting on this blog, I think such a discussion would be more effective and useful via entities such as Federated Mountain Clubs, which I know reaches many more people than my blog does. Therefore, if you have something especially engaging to say and are equipped to respond in that forum, I’d like to suggest considering a response via the FMC Bulletin or a similar forum. (eg. Write the editor a letter if you’re so inclined — Shaun likes letters. 🙂 ) Otherwise please tell your friends, or comment here if you’re not so organised or aren’t affiliated enough.
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  • It’s All in the Context

    Federated Mountain Clubs, in its October newsletter [PDF], notes the appearance of fake Department of Conservation signs around huts at the Otago/Southland end of the country. Some have political undertones and some just prompting cheap laughs. I’m not aware of any appearing elsewhere, but FMC is keen to know if you’ve spotted any.

    Josh Gale of Wilderness Magazine has since picked up the story, suggesting that at least one source of these signs is strongly suspected.

    DoC comes under recurring criticism for its proliferation of signs in the back-country (more on some of the history here). In this light, I think the most amusing aspect of this whole story for me, so far, has been a particular quote of Department of Conservation Senior Media Advisor, Herb Christophers, who was reported in Wilderness to have said:

    “Most people wouldn’t even read the thing because they’d think it’s just another DOC sign.”

    To be fair to Herb Christophers, Josh points out that he was freestyling at the time of the interview, and also said “I’m not too worried about it, it’s just some funny way people like to express themselves”. I just think it’s a gem of a snippet to come from one of the senior people involved with DoC communications. 🙂

  • Walkability, Connectivity, and Te Araroa

    Two months ago I wrote about Te Araroa (The Long Pathway), and it seems apt to point out that there’s now a set of forums which attempts to build a community of people wanting to discuss walking of the route. I heard about it during a typically tangenting discussion on the NZ Tramper website, which caused me consider more clearly what Te Araroa is for me.

    I guess it’s possible to perceive that Te Araroa is (or should be) a top-down consistently-designed, clearly-marked and well-managed walking track. Perhaps this will be the case some day with sufficient motivation throughout its length, but presently it’s a bottom-up effort to link together a massive collection of smaller walk-ways. Much of Te Araroa already existed, but the project (approaching 20+ years of effort) ensures that individual routes and walkways are connected and defined as part of the network. In places where there’s been no reasonably direct or useful connection between sections, access has been negotiated or built to complete the continuity.

    Being a bottom-up creation rather than a top-down creation, Te Araroa is not automatically a sparkly, consistent and necessarily easy-to-locate walkway for the entire length, despite ongoing efforts to improve it. What it does mean, however, is it’s actually possible to walk legally between any two places along the route with the exception of occasional bodies of water. At no place is it necessary to stop and get a bus, or drive a car between two points.
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