Survival is the name of this N.Z. exercise for Antarctic visitors

Press, 19 April 1985, Page 11

Survival is the name of this N.Z. exercise for Antarctic visitors

By

LINDA HARRISON,

who survived the

Antarctic survival training programme.

Three New Zealand mountaineers make their way each year to Antarctica to spend the summer months preparing for disaster and helping out when it occurs. This year they returned not entirely unchallenged, but without the shadow of tragedy having fallen over their work on one of the toughest continents on earth. Rob Hall, Paul O’Dowd, and Peter Sampson formed the core of New Zealand’s contribution to the joint New Zealand-United States search and rescue team (J.A.S.A.R.T.) for the 1984-85 season. With the help of an American mountaineer, Dave Lasorsa, they also ran the survival training school near Scott Base. Survival is the name of the game, and it was the job of Hall, O’Dowd, Sampson, and Lasorsa to make sure that everyone going into the field was adequately prepared to face the elements. If for any reason they were not, then it would inevitably fall on the survival training team to rescue them.

There were only two genuine calls on the services of the S.A.R.

team over the summer; fortunately, neither involved loss of life.

The first came early in the season, only a couple of days after the leader, Rob Hall, and his team arrived at Scott Base. They were called out to look for a United States Navy driver who got lost in a storm while clearing snow from the ice runway. “He didn’t know where he was,” says Rob Hall. “His machine was jammed in gear and he couldn’t disengage the clutch. By radio he was told to block one track and to travel in circles." That was at 1 p.m. Five hours later the search and rescue team was told that “things were somewhat irregular.” Eight S.A.R. team members and two tracked vehicles were sent out to help and by 11 p.m. had found the radar shack on the runway. The radar technician put his

equipment on a zero grounding and was able to identify for the team a mark on the screen that had not previously been there. The technician was then able to guide the S.A.R. team to the lost vehicle. Its driver was wearing jeans and a shirt and had only two hours fuel remaining. Hall points to the need this shows for the survival training his team offers and the lessons which would have lessened the seriousness of the incident. The other drama for the survival team came later in the season, fortunately when the pressure was taken off their survival training requirements. This incident involved the United States Hercules aircraft which became wedged in a crevasse while making an open field landing on the Starshot Glacier late in December. As soon as it was known that the

aircraft had struck trouble the S.A.R. team was called out, and the team of Lasorsa, O’Dowd, Sampson, and the Scott Base dog handler, Kevin Conaglen, was flown out on to the Ross Ice Shelf. When they arrived there, a few hours after the incident, it was to find that a helicopter had already lifted the crew and passengers from the glacier to the safety of the ice shelf. Not, however, before those in the aircraft had made their own survival arrangements — lessons from survival school 1

“They had tents up, the whole thing,” Hall says. The S.A.R. team went on up to the aircraft with a United States Navy accident board and flagged off the crevassed areas so that people could move about in safety. A day later they returned and this time flagged off a safe route for the recovery supply line, so that the Americans could move in people and equipment for the aircraft recovery. A couple of days later O’Dowd and Lasorsa went back to help shuttle recovery equipment from the shelf landing strip to the glacier. Their final involvement came a few days later when O’Dowd and Sampson spent four days on the glacier supporting the aircraft recovery effort. “Our involvement was in assessing front a mountaineering point of view the danger aspect of the area. It was a glacier and almost all glaciers have crevasses in them. Those people are pilots not mountaineers,” Hall says, of the squadron which operate the Hercules. He is relieved at the timing of the Hercules incident, which came when most of the survival training programme was over. The major reason his team was still in Antarctica was for S.A.R. responsibilities and to provide additional training for those who will be spending the winter in Antarctica.

Hall is pleased with the way the science team on board the Hercules handled themselves after the aircraft became stuck. They had all completed survival training, a pre-requisite for field parties. “They felt that the training had helped them. They had a good grip of what was going on.” Hall hopes all of the 450 who completed the survival training course over the summer would have been as capable of handling

the situation. They included Americans, New Zealanders, and a group of West Germans from the Ganovex expedition. New Zealand has run the survival training programme for 11 years, providing experienced mountaineers who work as a team with one American mountaineer. The two-day and one-night training programme provides an excellent opportunity for New Zealanders and Americans to mix in Antarctica so they can find out and appreciate more the roles played by others in the two-science programmes. The training starts with a lecture on the evening before the first field day. Participants are shown a film and slides giving an impression of what they are likely to encounter over the next two days. The equipment used on the course is demonstrated, and crampons and harnesses fitted. The first full day of the course begins with a morning hike up a slope with instruction along the way on how to use an ice axe, step cutting, self-arrest techniques, and ice axe belaying. For the non-mountaineering types the prospect of hurtling head first on your back down an icy slope contains a certain amount of trepidation but the whoops of enjoyment and the willingness to try

the technique again and again demonstrate the skill of the instructors at making something so vital to survival such fun to learn. The afternoon of the first day is taken up with a brief introduction to field camping followed by encouragement to get out there and do it. The class breaks up into smaller groups who then start the job of constructing the shelter in which they will spend the night. Several hours later the area is dotted with igloos, hollow mounds, and covered trenches sporting names like the Ross Sea Hilton. Inside, the occupants are sorting out their sleeping gear on to shelves cut out of the snow and preparing to spend the night away from base. • After a meal cooked outside over a camp stove, the tired diggers retire to bed — hopefully remembering to put all their clothes inside the sleeping bags or making them into a pillow so they won’t freeze during the night. The price of forgetting this lesson could be a pair of sad-looking boots, the tops of which have fallen to one side and frozen so hard that a foot cannot be prised into them the next morning (that was this reporter’s mistake). Abandoning, the shelter into which such effort went seems a shame but soon the class is on the

road again, heading for the ice fall area for roped-up glacier travel. There are plenty of real crevasses for the novice to poke an ice axe into and to consider the consequences of falling into one. The second day ends with prusiking and abseiling the ice fall, a dramatic end to what is for many their first introduction to mountaineering and the Antarctic outdoors. “We are trying to give them a basic course in using their brains before they use their hands. We are trying to take their science or their job for them for a few days and let them relate to their environment, and teach them tricks that will make them comfortable. We can’t make mountaineers in two days,” says Rob Hall. As well as the basic survival training course in Antarctica, the instructors also run specialised training for those people likely to experience different types of conditions, and also courses for those who will be spending the winter in Antarctica. “The difference is that in winter there is no aircraft support and you have to substitute a lot of personnel. During the winter it is manpower and land vehicles.” A joint McMurdo/Scott Base search and rescue team of 13 has four days of intensive training

before the professionals leave on the last flights home to New Zealand. • Another important group is the one which spends the winter at South Pole Station. Rob Hall had two days this summer at the station going through emergency procedures to be used for evacuation, fire, missing people, or aircraft crashes. “Survival training needs at South Pole are totally different to most other situations. They live in an artificial environment and during winter have no support whatsoever. The capability for support is questionable in an emergency. “Everything goes on in that dome. If support systems in the dome fail they have got to be prepared to look after themselves.” There is a self-contained emergency camp within several hundred metres of the main station. “The chances of having a major catastrophe at South Pole are very remote. There are three major buildings within the dome and they are not connected.” The fuel is so cold at the pole it is like golden syrup and has to be kept warm with heating blankets, so the chances of fire related to fuel use are diminished. “We stimulate people into thinking what their role would be in an emergency,” Hall adds.