A veteran SAR volunteer's experiences in British Columbia
I see by my server logs that some people visiting the blog are searching for a safe place to snowshoe. With all the injury, death and general mayhem that I usually blog about I thought I’d give a few suggestions. …
Continued from Part 1 So I’ve been trained to dangle under a helicopter, and it’s fun. However, like a lot of things in SAR, it’s all fun until it’s for real. And this brings me to the second surprise I …
I don’t usually weigh in on things, but I will on this one. The task of SAR is to differentiate from the Rest of the World (ROW) and the Search Area. We know we cannot search the ROW, so we …
Now that everyone with an internet connection has access to Google Earth and Google Maps, we all have access to some fairly high quality air photo imagery. This might seem to be a good thing, but there are problems with …
Ever since I saw my first mapping GPS I’ve been pretty critical of them (well, those that know me know I’m pretty critical about everything). To be clear I’m not critical about the basic utility of plotting your position on …
Every skier loves to slag a sledder. Forums all over the internets are alive with skiers talking about the Boulder Mountain Avalanche and how it wouldn’t happen to skiers, that the sledders are isolated from the sounds of the snow …
I’d like to talk about one or two things I’ve noticed that can help shed light on why 200 people would go out into such obviously dangerous conditions, and expose themselves to what would seem to be obvious risk. These …
Today over 200 people were on scene at an “unorganized event” known as the “Big Iron Shootout” near Revelstoke, there was an avalanche and several people were killed, many were injured and there are possibly some missing. In the past …
With all of the hand wringing about the Own the Podium program, and was the money worth it I thought I might apply some basic statistics to the problem. Testing weather or not a technique works is one of the …
I have been given a list of do’s and don’ts about being a volunteer at the Olympics: do not ask for athlete/VIP autographs or pictures while on duty or in uniform do not bring family members to work do not …