Four more lives that could have been saved by PLBs

So apparently this is turning into the 406MHz Personal Locator Beacon advocacy blog, but dammit this is important. Since I wrote last week about the out-of-bounds skier who died due to a cascade of missteps both personal and professional, two more stories of tragedy have hit the news. Once again, both stories could have been very different if someone had bothered to make the investment in a PLB.


First, there was the boating accident that saw two NFL players and their friend lost at sea. One man survived by clinging to the overturned craft, but as of today the Coast Guard search has been called off for the other three. The rescued boater spent nearly two days with the craft before rescue. Even with poor weather, the search could likely have started many hours earlier had a PLB alert been triggered.

Next comes the story of two off-piste snowboarders in the Alps. Once again, one of the party survived, this time by using a GPS-equipped iPhone and what seems to be a lucky strike with a WiFi signal from a nearby resort. His friend died, though that may have been the result of a fall. In either case, a PLB might have sped up rescue operations for one or both of them. This is also a good reminder that the COSPAS/SARSAT network is a GLOBAL cooperative effort. In this case, the same satellite constellation would have been notified, but rather than US Coast Guard, or Park Rangers, or the RCMP, the appropriate Swiss authorities would have been notified.

Seriously people, if you're going to be spending any amount of time away from the comfort of your urban/suburban environment, take one minute to think about how much you'd spend to be able to call for rescue in an emergency. How much would you pay to call 911 if you were trapped in a burning building? Lost at sea or stuck in a blizzard is just as serious and just as deadly. Why wouldn't you spend a little money to make sure you could call for help?

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One skier dead, one finally rescued after 10 days

According to a couple of stories from CBC News and GlobeandMail.com, a Woman has died after she and her husband got lost while skiing and spent 10 days in the B.C. wilderness.

The tragedy of this story is massive. I won't recount all of the details (see the above articles for that), but it seems that critical failures of preparation were made by the skiers, and critical failures of response were made by the local volunteer S&R team and the RCMP.

Sadly, any one of these missed steps by the skiers might have changed the outcome:

• They didn't let anyone know to expect their return that day. No ground search was launched until they were actually reported missing nine days after getting lost.
  
• The couple had no survival gear, just two granola bars and no water. Even a basic PSK (Pocket/Personal Survival Kit) would have provided for fire, and thus melted snow for water. An improvised shelter of even basic materials like a couple of garbage bags or a mylar space blanket would have reduced their exposure significantly also, reducing the need for additional calories to keep warm.
• No GPS or Map & Compass. Getting lost is best avoided by "staying found", but even someone who is massively lost could likely have found a path back to safety given a little time, and assuming they knew how to use those tools.
  
• No Personal Locator Beacon. A $450 PLB would definitely have alerted the highest eschelons of both American and Canadian SARSAT command and would certainly have kicked off the search nine days sooner, no matter what mistakes were made at the local government level.

As for the local volunteer S&R and RCMP organizations, I'm sure they will be looking long and hard at their own response procedures to determine why multiple SOS signals were ignored. The actions taken by the Golden & District Search and Rescue may even qualify as criminally negligent, and their response to the RCMP inquiries certainly hampered the RCMP response.

< Soapbox Mode > Its obvious that mistakes were made all around, but the skier's failure to prepare was the set that might have had the biggest direct impact.

Please please please, if you ever spend ANY amount of time in the outdoors, even as "civilized" as a ski or beach resort, consider your surroundings and circumstances and prepare for these kinds of events. And while you're preparing your few essential survival elements, please consider investing in a 406MHz PLB. I'm sure Ms. Fortin's family would agree that $450 is a small price in exchange for a life saved. If you have any doubt, let me point you to this other timely article: NOAA Satellites Helped Rescue 283 People in 2008

< / Soapbox Mode >

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Science Olympiad: Junkyard Challenge

After I coached the "Robot Ramble" team for Mount Carmel High School's 2008 Science Olympiad team, I suppose there was no chance I'd get out of coaching an event for 2009.

The Science Olympiad folks served up a new event for this year, "Junkyard Challenge". The event consists of students partially pre-building an autonomous device to complete a pre-defined task, but the students must incorporate one or more "Mystery Materials" into the final build that takes place on-site at the start of competition. Its a great way for the competitors to demonstrate the ability to improvise, and potentially exposes them to a lot of different concepts.



The task for the regional-level competition was "Tipping the Scale", in-which the students must build a device to determine the mass of a challenge object provided during the test.

There were a number of ways to build a simple mechanical device based strictly on Hooke's law or a balance scale, but I asked my team if they wanted to try something more advanced, and they said "Yes!".

I'm proud to say that my team of High Schoolers built themselves an electronic scale, complete with a hand-built 5-stage ring oscillator biased by parallel plate capacitor acting as a transducer to measure the compression of the scale as mass was added. Besides my usual safety lecture and introduction to various machining operations for the mechanical part of the build, I had to introduce the team to some of the basics of electronics, including RC-circuits and the basic concept of an ideal parallel plate capacitor.

The concept for the capacitive transducer is based on something I was exposed to during an internship back in college. Obviously there are better (cheaper, easier, more accurate) ways to detect mass, such as using a strain-gauge load cell, but the competition rules were very explicit in disallowing any components harvested from commercial scales. To avoid any possible problems, I helped them build the whole device from absolute scratch.

I couldn't be more proud, as my guys took 4th place in their event, and MCHS took 2nd place overall, meaning a select portion of the team is headed to the State Competition in Long Beach on April 18th.

See more pictures of the build process in my web album.
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I've gone meta!

I seem to have gone slightly meta, in that I'm writing a blog about my blog, but this is the sort of thing I want to document since I don't want to forget what I've done, in case I accidentally update a template and forget to merge this change back in.

You'll notice some of the long posts here will now get just a summary, followed by "Read More...", which is your indication to click:

I know I'm a long-winded chap, so I wanted to start breaking up the posts into pieces.

After a lot of searching and experimenting, I've gotten it working. I'm using the help provided by the blog Pinkish, but I found an error in their instructions which added a lot of time.

Without duplicating the entire content of the post, I'll point out Step 4 and Step 5 say:

Your splitted posts should look like:
This is part one of my post
<span class="fullpost">
This is part two.


But the correct span tag is <span id="fullpost">. This is critical.

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Makes me proud!

Folks standing in light drizzle at 7 am to vote!

Our line moved quickly, though the drizzle did cause one real voting problem:

The ink pens used for our optical scan ballots is apparently water soluble. At least one voter had significant smudging of a bubble due to rainwater on her sleeve. She was issued a new ballot and her old one was invalidated. Hopefully this won't be a high-percentage trend, as this could exacerbate a shortage of ballots if turnout is unusually high (which seems likely).

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