From a Google Alert....
TIMBERLINE, Ore. - A major search is planned early Monday for three missing hikers on Mount Hood.
Portland Mountain Rescue attempted to reach the area near Elliot Glacier where the climbers are throught to be. Volunteers from that group, along with the Hood River Crat Rats....
Anyone in Oregon working on this mission? The news mentioned that weather was a factor for air searches.
Semper vi,
Stephen
Probably not. The weather is going to be really bad today. There is a storm comming in and it is going to bring lowering snow levels and a lot of snow. and no ground teams, it is on the mountain.
I saw CNN do a story on this today. It was snowing a whole lot.
It might clear a little tomorrow but then i think it will be too late.
Fox News said this morning that "Air Force assets were standing by." Might that be us?
I'm not sure what can be seen with a Mk-1 Eyeball if the target is covered by heavy snow.
I saw in the Fresno paper that all search efforts were on hold due to weather. Having driven up Mt Hood in good weather, it looks like a [censored] in bad.
i think the airforce assets they are talking about would be some national guard black hawks. And the weather is not bad right this minuet, but it is going to get worse again.
http://www.katu.com/news/local/4897386.html
if you go to this site the second to the last picture appears to have an airforce PJ in the picture. As long is it is the airforce PJ's that still wear the maroon beret. Also there appears to be some military looking gear on the ground. If i am not mistaken these may be the remaining PJ's that are stationed in portland. so that might be the air force assets they are talking about.
Yes, and I don't know about Portland, but they can hussle some folks up & or down PDQ. SERE helps with these things too, actually this is just their kind of business. I understand they have a general location, & would be searching the area w/ FLIR given enough opportunity. Then put a couple PJs/SERE guys in to keep the guy company till they can all get out together. Can't see that CAP is capable of anything on that mission, not till Spring, and that should bother you about what we can & can't do.
Living in the mountains, I am not concerned that CAP doesn't do technical SAR. I know several folks on my local SAR team and the amount of training they are required to do - as volunteers - is huge. typically, one three-four hour meeting during the week and a eight-ten hour exercise on the weekend, every week, unless a real rescue interrupts they exercise, which happens about 50% of the time.
The search being conducted in OR is a technical search, not your typical walk in the woods search.
What do you tink volunteer firefighters do, & what do you think will be required of CAP GTM/GTLs to meet the NIMS standards for just the search side of the equation? A walk in the woods is fine if that's all the mission requires, but we shuold be ready to go on things a lot further beyond that, and I mean universally - that's the ONLY way we'll be called to legit roles in disasters or anything else really. Otherwise we might just as well hang it up. Air wise, take a look at teh FEMA cat.s for fixed-wing. You'll see not much place for eyeball-only search, really SDIS seems way below the average they're looking for. FLIR is in the zone though. We need advanced gear & crews trained on it. The ground side has what they need, they just need to work hard.
I don't think that CAP in general should get into mountain rescue. These guys prove that messing around in bad conditions is not a good choice even for the extremely experienced climber. I know that there are probably some pretty challenging mountains else where in the country, but i don't think there are many as challenging as the mountains in alaska washington and Oregon. I would imagine that the Rockies have some good peeks but you are missing the knock out blow from the pacific storms that we get. I really don't think that CAP should ever try to get into the mountain rescue business except for the air assistance. Maybe on the little mountains that are easy but not on these big ones. Leave it to the specialized teams.
I would tend to agree with that. It's the wilderness search &/or SaR rating that'll more genreally apply. The very most basic version of the mountain search requirements is necessary for some places like Colorado though that require it of all searchers to be on any mission, which is why CAP GT-ops there are limited. Mountain flying is no joke either. I'm not so worried about the technical nature of the quals, merely that many in CAP look at what we do as some kind of fun little game where they can do a VERY minor amount of training & then think they can rush off into the breach. That doesn't meet federal guidlines for starters, which is what prevents us from getting the calls; and it also makes a lot of people worry that we're just going to go out there & derail a search effot by needing to be rescued ourselves. If we're going to take SaR seriously in CAP in the future, then we have to move to compliance, there's no choice in that, and we have to meet the same kind of standards required of real rescuers - which gets expensive & time consuming. The jack-of-all-trades thing isn't going to work anymore. Now, just cause you meet those higher quals doesn't mean you're an expert that needs to be doing high rope work in a snow storm, it just means you have some basic knowledge & are safe to work in teh environment.
They are going to continue the effort until Saturday. After Saturday i would imagine that it will be called off.
It will be a shame if the search is ceased without a find one way or the other. I've worked searches that have gone on for up to 33 days and it's tough to stop, not knowing what happened.
The families deserve closure and the searchers need it as well.
Good luck to all and may they recieve the divine intervention that is so badly needed.
Quote from: mawr on December 15, 2006, 04:13:15 PM
It will be a shame if the search is ceased without a find one way or the other. I've worked searches that have gone on for up to 33 days and it's tough to stop, not knowing what happened.
The families deserve closure and the searchers need it as well.
Good luck to all and may they recieve the divine intervention that is so badly needed.
I hope they are found in as best condition as possible.
Local news(Fresno, Ca) last night had a short piece to the effect that a cell signal had been received from the area on the mt where one of the climbers was thought to be holed up in a snow cave. My understanding is that the wx has been so bad that no aircraft could get above 6k ft because of clouds. Mt Hood is just over 12k ft tall.
Bad situation: made worse by some really rotten wx.
the weather looks decent for tomorrow. It is terrible once again today. so bad that it flipped a 172 on top of a twin today.
there are a lot of searches that go unresolved her in Oregon. It seems like every year a hunter comes across the remains of a person lost. There was actually one a few weeks ago that had been missing for a few months, and another that had been missing for a year or two.
One climber found dead so far......... :(
Sad news.