Windy Tops

Tag: police

  • 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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  • Comparing accounts of accidents

    I’ve only been reluctantly following the recent winter incident on the Routeburn track, where a man slipped and fell, eventually dying. His partner stayed with him in freezing temperatures for several days as he died, then made her way slowly through deep snow to the isolated Lake Mackenzie Hut. She eventually broke into the nearby warden’s hut where she waited for a further 24 days before concerned friends on Facebook triggered a search with the help of local consular staff to liaise with New Zealand Police. Wilderness Magazine summarises the accident well.

    routeburn-stuff

    I’m not reluctantly following because I don’t care about the accident. It’s more that I’m reluctant to follow the coverage because so much of it is awful. At times it’s seemed more fascinated with the light-hearted “survivor” trivia of a person lasting alone for a month than of recognising and respecting that one person died, and another suffered a serious traumatic event. She then had to cope with it for a month before receiving any help, and having finally been rescued was very quickly subjected to a press conference that several media outlets advertised and live-streamed, in a language she doesn’t understand, and which she really didn’t need to be at.

    Stuff’s video example (see screenshot) is the one I’ve so far found most troubling to watch. I won’t bother embedding the video here, but I just hope it’s enough to note that the title image is symptomatic of the presentation that follows. To me it simply seems that the video’s makers and publishers have taken a terrible tragedy for multiple people, and dressed it up as if it’s simply a cheap reality TV entertainment show.
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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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  • 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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  • 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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