Windy Tops

Tag: search and rescue

  • A sad Tararua tale of the usual sorts of reasons

    I’ve held off writing much about the November 2016 accident in the Tararua, near Alpha Hut, where two people died. There hasn’t seemed to have been much new to write about which I haven’t already covered previously in this forum.

    Last week I received a copy of the final Coroner’s report, which has now been released. Flick me an email if you’d like a copy.

    Background

    There’s not much new in the coroner’s findings that has not already been reported. It makes for some depressing reading. The findings describe that both men were fit, and that one had “significant tramping experience in New Zealand”. Neither had ever visited the Tararua, however, and “experience” is often a subjective metric. It’s not a word that always correlates with ability in all circumstances.

    The two men appear to have made plans to attempt what’s commonly known as the Neill-Winchcombe circuit after a work conference in Wellington. The trip was a last minute decision. Clear intentions had seemingly not been left with anyone, except that they intended to stay at a hut, probably Alpha Hut.

    There’s a relatively direct route to Alpha Hut from their starting point, but they instead opted to follow a much longer, circular route. Maybe this decision was made if they thought the direct route appeared to short and boring, but exactly why this decision was made is unknown.

    Without clear intentions being available, the main sequence of events has been reconstructed from other evidence.

    Here’s a map of the area.

    The pair left the Waiohine Gorge carpark, inland from Greytown, in the early morning of Saturday 19th November. From there they tramped west to Cone Saddle, climbed to Cone, then north-west to Neill Saddle and around to Winchcombe. After Winchcombe, the route crosses to the west and eventually meets the more popular Southern Crossing track at the peak of Mt Hector. Hector is a relatively short distance south of Kime Hut, but they instead walked south-west, around the Dress Circle and eventually towards Alpha Hut where they most likely meant to stay the night.

    They never reached Alpha Hut.
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  • Thoughts on another Tararua rescue

    The Southern Crossing of the Tararuas has been in the news a few times lately. Shaun Barnett wrote this nifty description of the Southern Crossing for the April 2018 edition of Wilderness Magazine, although a feature on the Tararua Range in NZ Geographic from around mid 2016, by the same author, is much more comprehensive.

    Meanwhile the RCCNZ stated that last Sunday night, 25th March, and leading into Monday morning, a man’s life was undoubtedly saved by a group he met at Kime Hut after he arrived in a hypothermic state. A Stuff report provides further information, adding that he’d been with a companion.

    A PLB was triggered, and a LandSAR team walked up to Kime overnight. Low cloud meant a helicopter couldn’t safely reach Kime at the time. He was eventually assisted to Field Hut, at a lower elevation, and air-lifted out. His condition meant he stayed overnight at hospital. It’s good news in the sense that things could have been much worse, but weren’t.

    This case is interesting because the Stuff report suggests that the man mightn’t have been well equipped for the conditions in which he found himself. It reports that he’d previously competed in the Tararua Mountain Race, and it reads as if some of the gear he carried might have been more consistent with that sort of event.
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  • A fuller narrative of the Taranaki alpine tragedy

    In 2013 I wrote briefly about the (then) recent alpine tragedy on Taranaki.

    A very detailed, and interactive, report about that event has now been published by Stuff.

    The article is sourced from multiple in-depth interviews with people directly involved. It covers both the accident and the rescue operation, and its narrative flows from the beginnings of decisions which combined to cause things to unravel into a disastrous situation, through the attempts to plan and deploy rescuers, and eventually to the eventual musings and hindsight of what people wished had happened differently.
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  • Is this normal?

    On Friday 22nd October, 2016 (last couple of paragraphs):

    6815220608_6dda0bc0b1_n-2284820
    Pouakai Hut

    Meanwhile, police also rescued two people who had got lost on the Pouakai track on Friday.

    The pair were reached at Pouakai Hut on Friday afternoon, and were walked out on Friday evening, a police spokeswoman said.

    Then, on Thursday 17th November, 2016:

    Search and rescue staff have headed up to Pouakai hut to rescue two trampers that were “cold and wet and a little bit lost”.

    A police spokeswoman said they had called emergency services after becoming stuck at the hut on the top of the Pouakai Ranges in Egmont National Park near Mt Taranaki.

    The spokeswoman said staff were preparing to head up to the pair at 1.30 on Thursday afternoon and would walk them out of the park.

    The pair had food and water, and were not in immediate danger, she said.

    Here is Pouakai Hut on a map.

    I’m not a Taranaki local but I’m there frequently enough that I’m not a complete stranger to Pouakai Hut or the Pouakai Range. It’s a 1.5 to 2 hour walk up, for the reasonably fit, from the end of Mangorei Road. Most of that walk is under trees, and virtually all of it is artificially stepped and boardwalked.

    When I read about the first event I was surprised that someone could reach Pouakai Hut and still require help. Maybe it was just bad timing when asking for help, or being exhausted having somehow become lost amongst the heavily artificially tracked Pouakai Range. Less than a month later, however, it’s apparently happened again. Two people found their way to Pouakai Hut and, somehow, didn’t feel capable of getting themselves down.
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  • 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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  • A Fortunate Outcome at Kapakapanui

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    Looking towards the inner Tararuas
    from near Kapakapanui Peak.

    Late last month, two women had a very fortunate outcome in the vicinity of Kapakapanui.

    In the past, I’ve written multiple trip reports describing the very accessible loop walk which the women were attempting. Here is the region on a map.

    The pair, an international student from the USA and her visiting mother, set out on Tuesday 26th April, intending to complete the commonly walked loop route which, under normal circumstances, is very accessible to anyone reasonable fit. They never checked out of their motel on Wednesday 27th April, but it wasn’t until they failed to return their rental car by 11am on Friday 29th April that Police were called.

    Police quickly located the car at the base of the Kapakapanui Track entrance to Tararua Forest Park, at the end of Ngatiawa Road east of Waikanae. By now, statistics were already not in their favour, but exactly how long they’d been missing was unclear and weather had been unmemorable during recent days.

    A Search and Rescue operation was initiated immediately. Several other trampers were located who’d seen the pair on the track on Tuesday, providing a time-frame for how long they’d been missing, but exact intentions remained unknown. Early on Saturday 30th April, four LandSAR teams entered the area. At roughly 1pm that day, the two women were spotted by a helicopter. They’d spent 4 nights outdoors, with the daughter in particular by now being extremely dehydrated, starving, and possibly within a few hours of death.
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  • Groups Staying Together

    Stuff recently posted a story titled “Friends leave woman behind in bush — search and rescue called“. It refers to an incident in the Wairere Falls area near Matamata, suggesting that a group of friends selfishly left someone behind because she was too slow, resulting in both a SAR call-out, and prompting a particularly nasty comment thread below the article. More recently there’s been another odd-sounding case, of a group leaving a sick person behind having activated a PLB.

    I’ll state outright that I don’t consider it acceptable to consciously, or through negligence, leave someone behind because they can’t keep up, unless that person is complicit with splitting the group, remains well looked after, that both resulting new groups remain fully self-sufficient, and that each knows the other’s intentions. Being in a group means having a mutual responsibility to each other. Particularly if there’s enough of an emergency to set off a PLB, I’m struggling to rationalise splitting a group at all, unless the reason relates to the emergency, such as having part of the group attempt to walk out and get help independently.

    For various reasons I think the full context of the first event probably hasn’t been represented in the report, and the second case I’m struggling to justify from provided info, though a later report suggests they might have misunderstood certain things. I’m wary of judging people’s decisions under often-stressful circumstances based on terse media reports and I don’t care to dwell on either, but resulting discussion has veered towards tramping clubs and groups generally, and group safety techniques. It’s caused me to consider my own view of tramping in groups.

    It’s generally accepted tramping lore, at least within the club scene as it’s evolved through the decades, that groups should stay together when tramping, though there’s also some subjective inconsistency in what “staying together” actually means.

    When “staying together” how far apart is it acceptable to be? Must each person to be two-steps behind the person in front? Must everyone always be able to see each other? Should the slowest person always be at the front? Must there always be a person designated to always stay behind everyone else, also known as tail-end Charlie? Are there circumstances by which it’s acceptable for a group to split?

    I’ve met people with very strict, non-negotiable rules, and could collect a diverse range of answers to all of the above questions. I think my own response to all of these group mechanisms would be that it usually depends on circumstance.
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  • Good LandSAR Publicity

    This morning’s Dominion Post has some fab publicity for New Zealand’s LandSAR organisation, derived from a couple of recent high profile incidents in the Tararua and Rimutaka Ranges in the lower North Island.

    The first article profiles a couple of people who volunteer their time and expertise to work with Police who usually coordinate their types of searches. The second article describes some of the mechanisms and processes of a systematic LandSAR operation in New Zealand, and a summarised history of how it came to be this way.

    Both make worthwhile reading.

    Various other links of relevance: New Zealand Land Search and Rescue, LandSAR Wellington, Police dog Thames found on High Ridge in the Tararuas, and Runner found in the Rimutaka Range.

  • 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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