Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
tolman_paul
Trad climber
Anchorage, AK
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 08:36pm PT
|
Good God, sometimes folks get killed in the mountains, sometimes the best intentioned folks can't exact a rescue.
So since the rescuers weren't able to rescue the guy, and they didn't die trying, then they should be ridiculed. They'll have to live with themselves, and thats going to be rough. No doubt they wanted to help the guy, but they were unable. Maybe they weren't trained in rescue, maybe they were just physically and mentall spent, maybe being faced with a guy who was dieing on them they just froze up. Not everyone can be a hero, and, sometimes people die.
I lost a good friend on K2, who tried to rescue some injured climbers and he was swept off the mountain by an avalanche. Does that make him better than if he'd just said he was too beat after having summitted and someone else could have gone?
|
|
Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 08:39pm PT
|
a lot of good points here. i was not beating up on you rox.
the video makes it look like the rescuers could have done better.
but i cannot say not having been there.
what is evident is that the guides family is looking for fault.
i cannot blame the rescuers for that fault. i have no stake in this except for recognizing that someone lost their life and all involved are probably scarred in some respects. i cannot believe that anyone came out of this very well.
it is a tragedy and when throwing blame, ill will or snide comments at the rescuers one must step back and truly think.
|
|
SammyLee2
Trad climber
Memphis, TN
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 08:47pm PT
|
Stzzo,
I don't know. Yeah, it's big talk, that's all I have sitting here in my warm chair. I do know the difference. Somehow it just seems WRONG. I may be mistaken. There is much more than the 3 minutes we saw.
I anin't gonna brag. I've been scared out of my wits and ran. Other times, other situations, other outcomes. Are the mountains the only test of a man's courage? Never been there or done that. Seems like I've been tested other ways and sometimes did the right thing. Who knows?
Edit to add, at the last minute. Yes, I have taken lot's of first aid classes and you are right. Yet, sometimes I feel like my life is negotiable.
|
|
ec
climber
ca
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 08:56pm PT
|
ptd,
the reference article had the mD coffee item (couldn't figure the connection either)that overshadowed the part about the gal who pulled her friend out of a wreck to what she thought was safety (thought the car would explode; see what tv does to people?). Instead, she most likely caused her friend to be paralyzed.
 ec
|
|
SammyLee2
Trad climber
Memphis, TN
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 09:03pm PT
|
You know, I never thought so much about the secondary rescurer, who had to try to save ME, or retrieve my dead ass. Bad Karma, that.
Maybe they'd wait for better conditions? Hopeful thinking on my part.
Geeze, strong feelings on my part, seeing that dude crawling. It's beyond me, for sure.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
Venice, Ca
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 09:08pm PT
|
I question whether or not it is reasonable to demand heroics - or even a solid efort - from rescue personel. It's certainly great to have rescuers risk everything if you're in a fix yourself, but it's hard to hold rescuers responsible for not "saving" someone who put themselves on the mountain in the first place.
That much said, calling a man in extremis an "idiot" is pretty sketchy form, even if the intention was to rile the guy to action. But that dood had every sign of a dead man by the looks of that video.
JL
|
|
tom woods
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 09:15pm PT
|
froze to death? that makes this even worse. That sh#t can be dealt with.
|
|
tom woods
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 09:21pm PT
|
everyone says that a rescue up there can't be done. i don't know how to do it, but i don't agree that it can't be done.
forget blame- i'm curios as to what a perfect world rescue would look like, assuming the victim can't walk.
|
|
JLP
Social climber
The internet
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 09:52pm PT
|
"forget blame- i'm curios as to what a perfect world rescue would look like, assuming the victim can't walk. "
Jeff Lowe + company on Latok I is one highly contrasting example. There are numerous other examples of climbers with better mountaineering skills. Read the classics. History is full of them.
|
|
tom woods
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 10:12pm PT
|
I don't know this Latok I story but I've read a few classics. Annapurna is a self rescue. Art Gilkey on K2 comes to mind, again a self rescue, that didn't turn out well, but those guys can live with themselves for their effort. They tried, and it could have killed them.
Alex Low carrying a guy on his shoulders on Denali, is frikken awesome, but you cant always expect a mutant to be available when you need one.
This appears to be a some what organized rescue. It could be a failure of character, but it looks more like a failure to have a good plan to me.
Their big bummer is that they have to go up before they go down (where gravity will work for them.)
Hypothermia may be a peaceful end, but it doesn't seem a necessary end.
Six guys pulling on a wasted man trying to crawl, while quite possibly all they could do, doesn't strike me as a great plan.
No mechanical advantage? No effort to warm the victim? No team coming behind them? It just doesn't seem like a well organized effort.
What if the guy couldn't crawl? What was the plan.
Up and down can be done with ropes, pullies and mechanical advantage. They would need a litter or something to slide on and some training.
A sked type litter works great on snow, and its light and easy to pack.
they didn't have one? why not? What was the plan?
|
|
Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 10:34pm PT
|
It's a sad and tragic situation
Still, I am a guide, so I had some heart for
"I can only imagine that once the guide knew his clients were saved and he was no longer responsible he let go and caved in. His will to survive already all but consumed."
There is certainly some responsibility on the guide for having brought those clients into harm's way in bad weather. We all make mistakes and we don't know whether the clients understood the risk/summit gamble they were taking.
as for the rescue team, the thing is, it doesn't much matter if they are idiots, ill-trained or whatever. Most were non-sar volunteers and most definitely sacrificed all comfort, embraced much pain, and risked their own lives for the chance to save this guy. I'm sure they weren't busting their ass in a storm for the fun of it and if they were capable of doing it better or easier, they would have done it or wanted to do it.
The filming is an illusion. Cameras are tiny and shooting a few minutes of video takes little from a mega-hour effort, particularly when you reach the helpless time when you are days from relief and progress is a halt.
There but for the grace of God go all us, and whatever you think YOU could have done is pure conjecture. Stay up all night busting ass, then freezing, and up high too, and see what your ad-hoc team can do. If they were ill-trained and prepared, so what? The guide himself had just brought such people to the very same situation and rescuers had to be divided to rescue them as well.
Could the Sar situation on this particular mountain be better? I imagine very much so. It's the guide's responsibility to know that this isn't a place that has that wired yet. It's part of the hazards. We can be sure that a lot of people are in crisis spurred thinking mode now, about how it could be better.
and with that high peak fee, it should be better. But that's not the fault of the poor rescuers up at 20000 feet in the storm, it's an issue for those who collect the peak fees and decide how they should be spent.
Peace
Karl
|
|
tom woods
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 11:12pm PT
|
Karl- you are right. There is an issue for those who charge the fees, but for everyone as well.
How can we do better?
There are SAR situations that I can foresee, that I wouldn't know how to do. Most SAR teams train up and down on rock and snow, over talus systems and such.
I wonder what would happen with a bad injury on one of these long ridges, like those on temple crag. Some of these ridges are a lot of side to side before you could find a clean enough up and down.
This aconcauga thing, I'm just not sure how to do it. But I don't see why it couldn't be done.
|
|
TYeary
climber
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 11:13pm PT
|
There is a huge differance between getting someone down from near a very high summit with a broken leg, who still can function and can activily participate in his own rescue, to some degree, and trying to pull, cajole, and force someone to crawl, much less walk, up 300 meters and down the other side of a 23,000' mountain. This situation almost hopeless. I would like to believe that those there at the time did the best they could. I am no stranger to the issues of altitude or bad conditions, having made several trips to Peru's Blanca. I know what those guys were up against.
I was very saddened to see this video. We all know this happens but few of us see it like this.It is my opinon,that there should be no recriminations, second guessing, or litigation.
Sad, very sad.
Tony
|
|
tom woods
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 11:16pm PT
|
Most people here appear to be looking for supermen to carry the guy over the top.
I guess climbers are not really interested in rescue techniques, and so these things happen.
|
|
TYeary
climber
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 11:22pm PT
|
No offence Tom, but my partners are all interested in rescue techniques, practice them, and try very hard NOT to have to use them. Blanket statements like that only mask, at the worst, your ignorance, and at best all of our collective frustration.
Tony
|
|
tom woods
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
|
|
|
Feb 19, 2009 - 11:28pm PT
|
That was bait I guess.
And you may be right it may not be possible to rescue people up there, but it seems to me we can do better then what we saw in that awful video.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2009 - 12:58am PT
|
Hey Tom
Remember that boy scout that falls in a frozen lake and a boy scout leader rushes out there to save him. The leader falls thru the ice and now he's toast too.
Then another one rushes out there and he too falls in and succumbs to the afterlife .....
|
|
tom woods
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2009 - 01:10am PT
|
Sure- that can happen, but you know, getting to a victim fast isn't always best if you don't bring the gear, or you don't have a plan.
Running out to the ice might not be the best move, if an extra minute gets you some rope or a long stick.
Everybody here says it was either impossible to save this guy, or the rescuers were jerks.
I've seen enough people walk right by people in need, to know that these guys are heroes for trying.
This was an organized rescue, (we don't know what gear they had,) but I think an organized group could do better, maybe not.
You know how John Dill figured out how to get the bean bag to the guy on the wall so they can pull the helo rope over? There was a problem and he worked to solve it.
All these rescues are problems that we work to solve. You win some you lose some, but if we say these rescues can't be done, no one will ever figure out how to do it.
We're training snow rescue this weekend with the SAR team, I'm going to bring this one up.
|
|
tom woods
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2009 - 01:12am PT
|
There was that tragedy at convict a few years back.
Ever since then, Local LE and SAR teams have those stern? suits so you can jump into freezing water and float. The suits work great, but sometimes I wonder if they are there just to make us feel better because response time is always an issue in the Eastern Sierra.
|
|
pip the dog
Mountain climber
the outer bitterroots
|
|
|
Feb 20, 2009 - 01:43am PT
|
tom,
sheesh, i told myself i was done with this, but as i respect your work and your posts:
> This was an organized rescue, (we don't know what gear
> they had,) but I think an organized group could do better,
> maybe not.
i must respectfully disagree. from all i have so far read, this was an ad-hoc group of "guides and porters" who just happened to be on the mountain and at the higher camps just 'then' -- as news of this accident came down.
this was _not_ an organized, trained, pro SAR team. everything i've read suggests that the closest thing to an actually organized SAR team was not on the mountain, but rather quite a few km away.
had everyone waited for this organized SAR team to get to the mountain and tool up it (even if they were fantastic athletes) -- we are sill talking well into the next day before they would have reached anyone in that party of 5.
and at that point -- about mid-day the next day at best for true studs -- what kind of shape would the guide in the video have been in? after 6 or 10 mores hours of that he surely would have been long gone.
and, had the ad hoc group of non-SAR climbers not gone up when they did and rescued the remaining 3 clients of the party -- what kind of shape would those 3 have been in the next day when the well prepared pro SAR unit finally arrived. alive perhaps, but just barely. i suspect at best it would have cost them many fingers and toes -- likely far more.
i can understand your frustration at watching a group of poorly equiped volunteers clearly blow it (relative to what experienced pros could and would have done). hell, i find it gruelling to watch (once was plenty, i'm no necrophile).
but in the time frame of who and what was available then, it was either the amatuers in time to save 3 -- or the pros in time to save bits and pieces of 3.
tell me if i am wrong, but what i think i am hearing is people saying "yeah but if there was only a well prepared pro SAR group on the mountain, then the outcome would likely be different." ok, sure. i don't doubt that for a moment.
only there was no well prepared pro SAR group on the mountain.
those saying that the some part of the $500 peak fee should go towards having solid SAR on the ready, absolutely, i agree. let's work to make that happen. 4500 people summited last year times $500 equals -- way more than enough to get that done and still enrich the local government.
only on 1/8/09 there was no such pro SAR team on the mountain. so a bunch of dudes with no training in SAR and no special equipment and no pre-defined plan just did the best they could.
i respect that. think of all they did before that video frag ever happened. me, i am certain there are 3 italian clients who respect that. and i am certain that the dying guide would really have liked a pro SAR team on the mountain. only he better than any of us knew there wasn't one.
the "yeah but if only..." mindset eventualy ends up sounding like the early post on this thread that read something like "yeah if only some ubermensch had been there to pick him up, throw him over his shoulder, then paraglide off the peak..."
^,,^
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!