Windy Tops

Tag: search and rescue

  • 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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  • Risks of Experience

    Recently an incident in Auckland’s Hunua Range provoked a discussion in parts of the outdoor community. It wasn’t a discussion about a man’s getting lost for four days when intending a 4 hour daywalk so much as a discussion about the way he was repeatedly described in media as ‘experienced’, despite many of the things he did having been categorical opposites of what is typically recommended for those stuck in his situation.

    Once eventually found, an exciting story emerged. The man had at first made a mistake by following a trapping line off the main track on which he’d intended to remain. Despite having two maps (I’m unsure what sort of maps they were), neither proved useful. Intent on saving himself because he knew he could get out…

    …A determined Fong barely rested for the next four days as he followed water courses in the park, picking himself up from falls down hills, losing his map and running out of food.

    Unable to catch the attention of the searching helicopters, he even tried unsuccessfully to use an old tree trunk as a raft to paddle himself to safety, all the while never entertaining the thought that he would not make it.

    “I knew with my fitness I could get out, it was just a matter of time. In my head I just put one thing in my head and said I’ll get out and that’s it.

    “When I saw a mountain, I just thought ‘I’ll bust through that mountain and just keep going and going’.

    “I never felt tired, I just kept walking and walking. I never thought that I would die in the forest.”

    [—snip—]

    The bush was so dense that searchers could have passed within two metres of Fong and missed him if he was unresponsive. Duthie [the SaR coordinator] said it was a massive relief when Fong was located because there’d been little sign of him and as more time passed the chances of him safe decreased.

    Even after it was clear to him that a search was underway, he walked roughly 50 kilometres through thick bush where he would not have been visible from the air. He didn’t remain in the same place, and was eventually located in a region that had already been searched.

    This post is meant to be about the general media’s interpretation of experience within outdoor contexts more than any specific incident, but I’ll refer to this and a couple of other incidents for demonstration. There’s another discussion about similar things on the NZ Tramper website. As usual this is all just my own musings, and thoughts are welcome.
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  • Heuristic Traps of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing

    295010007_a9ffecce88_n-9281801
    Leaving South Crater near
    the end of spring.

    A rescue that may have been inevitable occurred in Tongariro National Park on Saturday, when 16 people were rescued from the Tongariro Crossing, at least four of whom were in early stages of hypothermia. Present media appear to be pushing an angle that assigns much blame to a shuttle operator (who also has a side of the story) for giving the group incorrect advice about weather, although that’s something I struggle to accept. [Update 5/5/2012: This morning the Dominion Post also weighed in with an editorial, which largely blames the shuttle operator, but which I also think ignores much of the problem.]

    “It got very nasty very quickly, and we became separated into three groups.

    “We had the strong wind at our backs and we didn’t want to turn back into a headwind.”

    Their hands became so cold that it became too difficult to open their packs to find food.

    It was not until a woman collapsed with hypothermia that they decided to head back, he said.

    Two Auckland trampers, Ghaz Jabur and Graham Plows, found the confused and hysterical group late in the morning and helped them off the mountain. They also contacted police by cellphone.

    “The visibility was down to 10 to 20 metres; it was a freezing wind and we were crouching behind this boulder when we saw this hysterical person coming towards us,” Mr Jabur said. “We asked him if he was alone and he said he was with a big party who were trapped further up.”

    The men grabbed their packs and climbed up to find the group huddled together. “They were hysterical; they had minimal clothing on – puffer jackets, hoodies, jeans, tights and sandshoes.”

    The men gave spare clothes they had in their packs to the worst-affected and tried to get them out of the wind.

    “All we could do was grab them and pull them down the slope. We did this for about 10 to 20 minutes, it was totally exhausting.

    “Two guys and two of the girls were in a really bad way. They were shaking involuntarily, they had hypothermia and their eyes were rolling. They couldn’t put food in their mouths; they would have died for sure.

    “The only way we could get their attention was to scream at them one at a time and tell them what to do.”

    For me, it’s a reminder that the Tongariro Crossing is one of the wackiest places I’ve been in New Zealand in terms of seeing unprepared people in a wild, potentially very isolated, changeable and dangerous environment. I wrote about this problem of inexperience combined with popularity at the Tongariro Crossing a couple of years ago, and this TVNZ Close Up story from a few months before impresses the extent of the problem.

    It’d be premature to try to comment on specifics of exactly what happened with regard to advice given, but I’m not entirely sure it’s relevant. While it’s good to have responsible people on the edges, assigning blame to operators for dropping off and collecting people who aren’t prepared also ignores the bulk of the problem.

    That said, it also feels simplistic to just assign blame to people themselves and go no further—there are bigger things happening. Even if 16 people found themselves in trouble and had inadequate clothing and weren’t properly aware of the forecast and nearly died, and even if it is their own fault, they still weren’t doing anything especially different from what a substantial proportion of people have been doing before them and will likely continue to do in the future. In that respect, these people just happened to be the unlucky ones out of the crowd. For me, that is a much bigger problem, and this incident is merely symptomatic.
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  • A nice New Zealand LandSAR documentary

    I may be late again, but it’s nice to discover that someone’s recently made a sane, down-to-earth documentary about New Zealand’s voluntary LandSAR Organisation. It makes a nice change from some of the overseas Search and Rescue videos I’ve come across which often seem to be artificial self-promoting noisy-overvoice and patriotic-music productions that focus on SAR being an heroic high risk profession, and which emphasise elevation of SAR above common people, to be left only for professionals. This NZ LandSAR documentary, on the other hand, spends much time interviewing people who take part, and emphasising how LandSAR is made of regular people with normal jobs. It provides actual information, instead of slow-motion closeups on actresses hopelessly weeping about lost husbands. Hooray!

    Courtesy of Morningside Productions for the Open Door Series, the documentary’s available for viewing in the ether, in two parts.

  • Research of Interesting Outdoor Whistles

    Several years ago, and soon after a couple of occasions when I’d wanted a whistle on very short notice but didn’t have one, I went out to buy a whistle to attach to my pack. With very little research I bought a Fox40 Classic whistle because it was easy to find and because their marketing said they were fantastic, and also that they were the "standard choice for personal safety and rescue professionals worldwide". Besides giving me greater opportunities to annoy people, I thought that maybe it’d be useful in a SAR situation some day, too.

    Sadly I felt let down after some time. Despite the Fox40’s ability to momentarily deafen me any time I blew it, I found it often didn’t annoy people at a distance in an open space, or even reach their ears, as much as I hoped. I put this down to various issues in the bush, like the frequency of corners little hillocks around which sound probably wouldn’t be travelling well, and probably also some audio absorbing properties of thick vegetation. Recently though, I was pointed to some research that’s been done on whistles, and (even better) it’s about the effectiveness of different whistles in New Zealand back-country conditions.

    Specifically, in 2006 a group of New Zealand Youth Search and Rescue members ran tests that compared a variety of whistles, as well as a giant honker and “yelling and screaming”. The tests have very recently been updated in 2012 to include comparisons of some extra whistles that were provided by Safety Whistles NZ. [Edit 9-Sep-2015: The above-linked page is no longer available, but it’s helpfully still hosted by the WayBack machine.]

    From personal experience I’m not surprised in hindsight that the Fox40 whistle tested badly, coming 6th out of 7 whistles and (after the 2012 tests) being barely comparable with a newly tested Safety Whistle. I was surprised by a couple of things, though.
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  • Not much to say

    I won’t comment much about the recent tragedy to befall one of the Wellington-based clubs over the new year, except that my thoughts are with them and the affected families and friends.
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  • A Storm Brewing in DoC Intentions

    There’s an interesting storm brewing in Canterbury over DoC’s decision to phase out paper-based intentions forms in favour of instructing people to use the AdventureSmart website instead, which either helps people to create their own intentions forms with their own trusted contacts, or (after many clicks) appears to eventually direct people to the RoughPlan website as the only “approved provider” for recording intentions via a website. Kingsley Timpson, of DoC’s Waimakariri area office, stated (to The Press) that it isn’t DoC’s role to manage people’s intentions, and DoC’s head office has stated the new web system is “safer and easier to use”. [Edit 7th May 2012: Radio New Zealand’s Nine To Noon hosted a panel this morning to discuss this change.]

    Graeme Kates, the now-former chair of Arthurs Pass Search and Rescue, has just resigned his chairing position, and also his front-desk DoC visitors’ centre position, in protest over the change, claiming that the decision will cost people’s lives. Mr Kates is well known in SaR circles, running a comprehensive website for Arthurs Pass Mountaineering on which he continually documents accidents and rescues, and which I’ve cited from here on several occasions. He’s documented his concerns on his site in more detail.
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  • Keep an eye on the Tararua hut books

    Don’t be too surprised if you get pushed over from behind by a few hut-baggers racing through the Tararuas during the next couple of months. Lower North Island LandSAR is running a Tararua hut-bagging contest for its members. (Specifically with entry being open to lower North Island LandSAR, the Police SAR Squad, and Airforce BCF.) Until 7th December 2011, entered teams will be allowed three 48 hour “trips” to clock up as many points as possible. This will probably encourage some non-stop no-sleep rogaining techniques by the more committed teams.

    The competition’s only open to people associated with LandSAR, but the rules and points table are amusing to read all the same. As well as bagging huts and points of interest, points are being awarded for providing GPS tracks, and for logging in Mountain Radio Skeds. There seems to be nothing in the rules to prevent a team from calling into all three of the Wellington, Central North Island and Hawkes Bay skeds in an evening, but I guess they might also need to decide if it’s worth another 10 points to stop moving for another 30 minutes, given how long it can take to properly get a mountain radio aerial up and down.
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