Windy Tops

Tag: plb

  • One Way Communication

    There was a report a couple of days back of some people being rescued in Kahurangi National Park, having activated a personal locator beacon.

    The three women […] had been tramping on the Leslie-Karamean track when they became stranded on Sunday by the rising waters as they attempted to get to the Venus Hut.

    After retracing their route, they sheltered at Thor Hut overnight before reassessing their situation. With river levels still rising on Monday morning, the women activated their emergency locator beacon. […]

    Rescue helicopter pilot Barry McAuliffe said the women set off the beacon so people meeting them at the end of the track didn’t consider them overdue.

    “They were just worried about their deadline at the other end and if they weren’t there at the end then all hell would have broken loose,” he said.

    There’s been some criticism in social media about whether this was an appropriate activation. From that description is reads as if they were most likely safe at a hut.

    Exact guidelines for appropriate PLB use are ambiguous. The NZ Radiocommunications regulation which grants a general licence for broadcasting signals on 406 MHz states that it’s only legal to send a signal under that licence if safety of life or property is threatened. The Mountain Safety Council states that PLBs “must only be used in life threatening situations“. Maritime New Zealand’s Beacons page has a lengthier explanation (abbreviated below):

    A distress beacon is an emergency device to be used when assistance is required to ensure the safety of lives e.g. any life threatening situation or when a serious injury has occurred – it is not a taxi service!

    Situations can deteriorate rapidly, however, if you are unsure about when to activate the beacon, it is better to activate it and get help – don’t wait until it’s too late!

    When considering activating your beacon please remember that carrying out a rescue can be extremely dangerous not just for the casualty but for the rescuers as well, particularly if the rescue is carried out at night or in poor weather conditions. If your situation is not life threatening and you are in a safe and secure position it may be prudent to delay activation of the beacon until daylight or the weather conditions improve.

    In other words, the agency that’s mandated as a first responder to PLB activations in New Zealand states that it might be acceptable to activate a PLB if you think the situation may get worse. That makes sense.

    The pilot quoted above suggests that the activation was appropriate, and without a full context beyond a media that’s often incomplete and inccurate with this type of thing, it may be worth giving the party the benefit of the doubt. This is certainly a good opportunity to discuss some of the wider issues around PLB activation, though.
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  • Ordering of Priorities

    I recently attended a great talk, courtesy of a person whose group of four was rescued from the Tararuas less than a year ago. The incident was not reported by media. If it had been then it probably would have attracted much criticism.

    They had made a series of bad decisions, then become stuck in a situation where, due to exhaustion there was nowhere they could go. They activated a Personal Locator Beacon, which at first mis-represented their position as being safely in a hut. To its credit, the RCCNZ made no assumptions about the safety of the group. Weather prevented a helicopter from reaching them immediately, and so a small fast-moving LandSAR team was sent on foot towards the hut where they were initially believed to be. The helicopter finally made it through. Based on hut book comments they were eventually found some distance away, having endured 170 mm of rain overnight with no adequate shelter, and with a dire outlook for the near future had help not arrived.

    It’s uncommon to hear people speak so openly in front of audiences about such an experience, knowing mistakes were made. The speaker was perfectly humble about the group’s mistakes, and I really appreciate the attitude with which the talk was presented.

    I asked about what might have happened if they’d not had the PLB. He treated the question as theoretical on the grounds that he’d never go out without a PLB, but otherwise guessed that there could easily have been deaths had they not had it. This philosophy about never venturing out without a PLB is consistent with a recent media push of promoting Personal Locator Beacons above all other aspects of back-country safety, at least as far as I can tell. I think this struck a chord for me, because for as useful and important as I see PLBs, I struggle to justify carrying one without carrying the type of portable shelter which would not only have kept them warm and dry until help arrived, and probably prevented deaths if rescue had taken an extra day, but very possibly could have prevented the entire emergency to begin with.

    Any rescue is useless, as is a PLB, if you can’t stay alive long enough for that help to arrive. Requested help can often take hours or days, depending on circumstances. As recently as two years ago, two people with perfectly adequate communications could not be reached by rescuers before it was too late. Until help arrives, self reliance is all you have. To me, thinking of a typical tramping scenario combined with the NZ weather’s high tendency for precipitation, good portable shelter is a very important component for heightening chances of survival if something goes wrong.

    PLBs are also not essential in every rescue which involves them. Help will still arrive, without doing anything, if you’ve followed a few habits like telling a reliable person of your intentions, then sticking to them, so that search coordinators can make efficient estimates of where they’re likely to find you once you’re reported overdue. Having a PLB in these situations can obviously result in much less stressful time and be extremely convenient for all concerned, but it’s not as essential if you’re likely to be quickly found and rescued anyway…. after being reported overdue.

    In this post I’m not trying to argue about whether PLBs should or shouldn’t be carried. I still think they’re a good idea, even moreso under certain circumstances, and I carry one myself. Here, however, it’s more the ordering of priorities which I’m finding interesting.

    With so much recurring media discussion about how people are automatically idiots when they don’t carry PLBs (check out the colourful comments thread), I do struggle to see the logic of how we still see many people apparently not carrying reliable portable shelter for staying warm and dry, let alone some of the other basics of the Outdoor Safety Code, like telling someone where you’re going. We barely even talk about preventative stuff like portable shelter in the media, compared with the amount of talk about reactive stuff like PLBs. Personally, however, I’d rate reliable portable shelter as being more important than a PLB for most circumstances, if it were necessary to choose between them.

    …and now to try something…

    All of this reminded me of an old NASA-sourced exercise from many years ago. The exercise, happily still around on the internet, posits a scenario of leaving a crashed spaceship on the daytime side of the Moon, needing to reach a mother ship, 200 miles away. Participants are given a list of equipment they can take, and must prioritise items in order of importance.

    [Stop reading here if you want to try the exercise without seeing a discussion of answers.]
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  • Changing Times

    It’s silly season again, where holidays collide with pre-February weather. An annual bubble of SAR-related incidents has hit the news-wires in the past few weeks.

    One story in particular first came out on January 2nd. It concerned a search for “five young trampers” in the Tararua Range who planned to walk to Penn Creek Hut via Table Top, then follow Penn Creek and the Otaki River back to Otaki Forks. They were reported overdue, and it was resolved quickly after Police sent a helicopter into the range, only to discover the group completely safe at Penn Creek Hut, drying out gear having turned around.

    For some time now, especially since the old track which sidled above Penn Creek was washed out, the route has become notorious for parties becoming stuck and requiring rescue. This group had not required a rescue, but that information was not available and so a search operation was launched anyway.

    Search officials use many factors to decide how likely it is that somebody might need help. There’s not enough reported context to fully explain why a search was launched when it was. My guess, however, is that a combination of “5 young people” plus “Penn Creek” plus “several waves of incoming torrential rain and certain flooding”, and very possibly some additional information, left doubts about the party’s ability to cope with circumstances on its own, and led to a conclusion of a reasonable chance that the group might be in trouble.

    From the moment of that conclusion, the situation needs to be resolved as urgently as possible. If a helicopter had not found 5 relatively-happy people drying their gear in a hut, it might have been necessary to inject ground teams into some awkward parts of Penn Creek, and lift them out again, during a short window of time prior to likely floods.

    The reports of this incident inspired an untypical amount of attention in social media. One of several examples is on Federated Mountain Club’s Facebook page. The main discussion, however, was neither about the details of the trip nor the actual search operation. The most common angle of interest has been on the comments from police afterwards.

    Specifically, Police spokesperson Andy Brooke was quoted as saying “it is a timely reminder to take at least two forms of communication with you when venturing into the outdoors.”

    The discussion has probably been prompted because this statement isn’t so much a recommendation to consider if taking communication is appropriate as a directive to take communication, on an implied assumption that the necessity of communication is now a foregone conclusion. The two particular forms of communication with Mr Brooke propsed were a PLB, and a Satellite Communication Device such as a SPOT or inReach.

    It’s sparked some informal debate about at least two things: (1) Whether a PLB would have made a difference in this situation given that the party had no actual emergency, and (2) whether parties should be obliged to carry any communication at all.
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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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  • 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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