Tasmania has some of the harshest, wildest and most rugged wilderness terrain in Australia.
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Those who venture into the bush are entering a world where small mistakes can have big consequences. But, they are rewarded with exhilarating experiences, wondrous scenes and they get to experience places few others do.
In such wild and remote places, things can go wrong very quickly. When they do, the Westpac Rescue Helicopter is mobilised.
On November 22, Ed Bastick made a small mistake, which quickly compounded with bad luck to put him in a terrifying situation not many escape from.
He and three others had taken six days to traverse the challenging Eastern Arthurs range, finishing by climbing notorious Federation Peak.
The team of four climbers had summited and were on their way down, with Ed in the lead.
“On the way down I sort of took a wrong turn at the top of a buttress, the approach to the down-climb looked very similar to the approach I was looking for,” Ed said.
“I lowered myself into [this crack] and was looking for footholds … there was just nothing I could put my feet on that would actually support my weight.”
Then the rock he was holding sheared off the main face, leaving him dangling off his right hand only.
“It was bloody scary. As the rock gave way I was hanging there for half a second looking for somewhere to drop onto realising that there basically wasn't anything below me that would catch me,” he said.
“I was like, ‘Well this is how it's all going to end, I’m dead’.”
After his hand slipped off, Ed hit a small rock outcrop about two metres down, which slowed his fall and broke his leg, before falling around another eight metres onto a steep, rocky chute.
“Probably 75 degrees facing downhill, I started sliding pretty quickly down that and rolled over and managed to grab some roots on the way past and stopped myself from falling probably another almost 50 metres,” he said.
The rescue crew said it was more like 600 metres, straight down.
Ed’s brother Rob was part of the walking party following behind him.
“I heard him yell basically, disappear out of sight and then yell,” Rob said.
Ed said, “I sort of screamed a bit and looked at my leg and it was facing the wrong way and I’m like, ‘Oh right that’s definitely broken’.
“I yelled up at the remainder of the party and went, ‘Yeah well I’m alive, I’m okay, I haven’t hit my head, I can feel my toes, my leg’s definitely broken ... I’ve set the epirb off.”
Luckily for Ed, the Westpac Rescue Helicopter was already in the South West searching for a walker. Once they received the epirb (personal locator beacon) call they immediately left to head to Federation Peak.
“We’re searching around and then we find these four people perched basically on the side of the summit,” Westpac Rescue Helicopter intensive care paramedic Dave Brown said.
Aircrewman Senior Constable Josh Peach said, “If I could describe what it looked like from the air, when we got there it looked like four people velcroed to the side of a rock, and we actually said, ‘Oh God, how are we going to get them?’.”
The helicopter was unable to reach Ed without its rotor’s striking the cliff; as it is they had to come within metres of the rock to winch Mr Brown and Senior Constable Peach down to a small outcrop about 10 metres away.
“Because the weather was closing in and there were some fuel issues we had to get him going pretty quickly,” Mr Brown said.
Weather is the most limiting factor for the rescue chopper said Senior Constable Peach, “A simple job can be very, very difficult if the weather is terrible, particularly in mountainous regions.”
For this reason, it is first and foremost a rescue service.
“Sometimes I don’t have time to do anything, it’s a rescue first and then it’s medical and in other cases it can be too dangerous to apply care … and can actually make the person worse,” Mr Brown said.
“I know that this person’s alive now so my first priority is to preserve that, so I get them out first and once it's all safe I can start to cut away things, and splint fractures and add pain relief and all of that sort of thing.”
The Westpac Rescue Helicopter has completed upwards of 2500 rescues, and each time a crew heads out they are entering a dangerous situation.
“Essentially we’re tasked because it’s dangerous anyway, it’s dangerous for the patient to stay there ... it is intrinsically dangerous to be dangling off cables and that sort of thing,” Mr Brown said.
Often when the helicopter is called in, it is because the weather is bad and conditions are challenging. The most dangerous times are when they are needed most.
They have strict procedures to minimise the risk, and if a single crew member feels something is unsafe they don’t proceed. Teamwork is vital to their success and safety.
“The next thing (after weather) in Tassie is terrain; we’ve got some pretty crazy mountains and we’ve got very very tall trees and thick vegetation in places and it's not easy to get people in and out of those spots,” Senior Constable Peach said.
Federation is one such place.
Ed has nothing but praise for the helicopter crew who winched him off the mountain. He knows he survived something most people don’t.
“There are so many places on that mountain where if you fall that’s it … had I gone a metre one way or a metre the other or in any which direction the outcome would have been fairly different,” he said.
For the search and rescue crew, the rise in use of personal locator beacons (PLB’s) has made their job much easier, and made those in trouble much safer.
“It just means that instead of waiting up to one or two days you can be found within 6 or 8 hours, sometimes less,” Mr Brown said.
The crews in the red and yellow helicopter that pluck people to safety not only love their job, they excel at it. They are there for those in trouble 365 days, 24 hours.
Donations, private and corporate, keep them in the sky.