Woman Dies After S.O.S. Signal was Ignored

Yesterday I wrote about a young Montreal man reported a threat made on the Internet from a young teenager in Norfolk, England. He was on a site and saw the young boy type how he was going to get back at the people in his school by throwing a firebomb. Neufeld, the Montreal man took it very seriously. He engaged the young boy online questioning him on just he was going to carry off his bombing of the school while he got on the phone and called the Norfolk constabulary. His intervention may have saved many lives.

It gets us to think just how much we can help as ordinary citizens of the world; how we can stop senseless deaths. Yet, the people who are in the business of savings lives do not always come through, these people include, doctors, psychologists, and police officers.

We all know the international maritime distress signal S.O.S. The message was first tapped out in Morse code on wireless telegraph since the end of the 19^th century. Guglielmo Marconi was the inventor of the wireless telegraph. Morse code is a system whereby letters are tapped out to spell words using a series of short shorts signals referred to as dots and long signals referred to as dashes. Three dots, three dashes, and three dots again, spelled out S.O.S. S.O.S. was believed to originally mean “save our ship.” Today it is used worldwide to mean help in any condition where a human is in eminent danger.

Unfortunately help did not come fast enough for a couple vacationing in Golden, B.C. this past February. Gilles Blackburn aged 50 and his wife Marie Josee Fortin, age 44 set out for a wilderness trip in western Canada. On February 15, the Quebec couple arrived in Golden, B.C. after leaving their hotel in Alberta. Before checking into a new hotel they planned to do some skiing way out in the backcountry and got lost.

On February 17^th a skiing guide spotted an S.O.S. signal in the snow and alerted the Golden and District Search and Rescue team. He also alerted the Kicking Horse Resort. An initial search was conducted at the time, but this search was limited to the general parking lot for abandoned vehicles at the resort. The couple never parked there, they used an underground parking lot instead. The search team never bothered to check for missing ski equipment or the underground parking lot and they ended their search at that point.

On February 21^st there were two more sightings of S.O.S. signals in the snow by skiers who alerted the RCMP. However, when the RCMP contacted Kicking Horse Resort they were told they already had done their investigation and there was no evidence supporting missing people. The RCMP did not take further action at that time.

On February 23^rd the family of Blackburn and Fortin filed a missing person’s report when the couple did not return home to LaSalle, Quebec (near Montreal).

The following day, February 24^th, the search resumed and a helicopter spotted a man waving his arms in the snow. He was rescued but it was already too late for his wife who had frozen to death.

In B.C. the search and rescue team must first be given the okay to go on the search and rescue mission; they cannot just act on their own. While the search and rescue team wait for the RCMP to give them the okay, Blackburn and his wife were walking around for days in the snow. They built shelters wherever they could. Ian Foss the manager of the volunteer Golden Search and Rescue team said, "It's pretty incredible that he actually survived," Foss said. "Ten days in the Canadian wilderness in the winter is pretty significant."

The couple did not have any food with them except for two granola bars. They found water to drink, and Blackburn even slipped under the ice into the water and managed to pull himself back up. Further more this part of the country is steep rugged terrain and not a place for an inexperienced individual. Blackburn and his wife were experienced outdoor people and only Blackburn made it in the end. He was taken to the hospital with symptoms of frostbite.

Could his wife have been saved? If only the search was conducted two days sooner she would have been. The RCMP admits making an error in judgment by not launching a full-scale search sooner.

S.O.S. means help, not ignore!

Sources:

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/print/CTVNews/20090225/couple_rescued_090226/20090226/?hub=TopStories&subhub=PrintStory