Windy Tops

Tag: media

  • The tragedy over the long weekend

    People who read this may have heard about the climbing tragedy up Mount Taranaki over the weekend, within Egmont National Park. I’ve wandered around the park a few times, and I walked to the top of the mountain in late 2010 (via the most direct and easiest route). I guess this accident feels closer to home for me than some others, despite me not being an alpine climber.

    So far, this article is the most down-to-earth media collation I can find of what is and isn’t known.

    I’ve checked my photos from my own most-recent visit. The following two photos respectively show the area near the top of The Lizard, standing with the camera at 2435 metres, but on a nicer day. The Lizard veers around to the right (in the second photo) below this rocky spine. The two climbers reportedly chose to dig themselves into the ice, located at about 2400 metres, slightly below where these photos were taken, having climbed the East Ridge and come down from the summit. On a topo map, that would have placed them about here, give or take.

    5295509263_75408263db_z-5459048
    Looking up.

    Looking down.
    5296102492_2faae34ce7_z-7008548

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  • Staying put

    ACR ResQLink

    I’ve finally bought myself a Personal Locator Beacon (PLB; an ACR ResQLink in my case), which I obviously hope I’ll never need to use. I was on the edge of buying one a couple of years ago, but put it off for a while when things changed. It arrived in the mail a few days ago.

    Several SAR incidents were making the news on the day that my PLB turned up. One of these occurred in the southern Ruahine Range. In this most actively-reported case, a PLB was activated by a tramping club group which had taken a wrong turn in bad weather.

    In the Pohangina vicinity (here’s a map) they’d planned (according to the club’s trip schedule) to head up Shorts Track, follow the tops over .1380, .1405, .1350 and down to Ngamoko Hut, before eventually returning somehow via Toka Trig and down Knights Track. A navigation error in bad weather on the first day, however, in the vicinity of Whaingapuna (.1405), resulted in the group ending up in Piripiri Stream. They changed plans to attempt to follow it out to farmland, but found themselves bluffed by a very high waterfall.
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  • An update on that “inappropriate PLB activation” incident

    In February I wrote a lengthy post based on a major media incident where a man was reported to have activated a Personal Locater Beacon (PLB) because he was “running late”. This wasn’t just out-of-control media, however. It was sparked by a hasty press release pushed out by the Rescue Coordination Centre of New Zealand (RCCNZ)—the part of Maritime New Zealand which is responsible for monitoring and responding to PLB activations. In my opinion, the press release was full of inflammatory and unverified innuendo that accused the man of “apparently” mis-using the beacon, and it then threatened to charge him for mis-use. At the time, popular media lapped it up.

    It’s great to see, therefore, that the RCCNZ has now completed an investigation and cleared the man of any wrongdoing with respect to activating the PLB. (Here’s the Fairfax coverage via the Nelson Mail or the Press, which have different comment threads.)

    To me this whole incident seemed uncharacteristic and inconsistent on the part of the RCCNZ, certainly when compared with other rescue organisations. I haven’t seen reliable details of the specific incident and therefore can’t comment on this man’s case, except to note that being cleared of allegedly activating a PLB without an emergency doesn’t necessarily mean that things couldn’t have been done better to avoid problems in the first place. What I do know is that PLBs are activated regularly in New Zealand, and some activations are definitely less appropriate than others. I still don’t understand what was so incredibly special about this incident which caused it to be singled out. I can’t see any clear reasons why the man’s actions were taunted so strongly and inconsistently, especially from official sources, when there are so many other incidents to choose from.
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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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. 🙂

  • Cooking gas to be removed from some Tararua Huts

    I realise there will be concerns about the Department of Conservation’s Wairarapa Conservancy deciding to remove cooking gas from several huts on the Wairarapa side of the Tararuas. DoC’s current Wairarapa Alerts page lists three of the affected huts as Mitre Flats, Totara Flats and Tutuwai. I’d guess Powell Hut and Jumbo Hut will also be targets, but can’t find this officially stated. The reasoning for the removal of cooking gas is that budgets are tight, and providing cooking gas for these serviced huts is quite an expensive operation.

    Personally I’m not concerned about this move. To me it seems that cooking gas (if required to cook one’s chosen meals) is something that should really be carried by a party already, even if they expect to find cooking facilities at a hut, simply for self-sufficiency. If you happen to fall over or otherwise get stuck part way to an intended hut, and don’t have the necessary equipment to cook your meal, you could very well be going hungry and find yourself in danger.

    The Dominion Post article quotes a manager of the Kuranui Outdoor Education Academy as saying that loss of cooking gas could be a safety issue because he might need hut gas to heat up a brew for students, and that carrying their own cooking equipment will make students’ loads heavier. If it’s an accurate quote, however, I have serious trouble accepting this reasoning. Children or not, if the party isn’t carrying self-sufficient cooking facilities on the way to a destination, it’s a safety issue already.
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