'More severe' search and rescue operations dealing with fatalities on the rise

MYTCHALL BRANSGROVE/STUFF

More and more Kiwis are participating in outdoor activities, but that’s not the reason why the numbers of search and rescue fatalities are up, the Mountain Safety Council says.

An increasing number of search and rescue operations in New Zealand are dealing with fatalities, according to recently released Land Search and Rescue figures.

LandSAR statistics show jumps in all categories of rescues, but tragically the biggest increase in numbers is in responding to an incident in which a person or persons lose their lives.

Figures from this year supplied to Stuff, from July 2021 to June 2022, show that LandSAR responded to 55 incidents where a person died, up 72% from the year before. In 2020/2021, it was 32 deaths, and 36 in 2019/2020.

Pre-pandemic, LandSAR attended incidents in which 61 people lost their lives in 2018/2019.

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There has also been a huge jump in the number of people who were assisted by LandSAR in Civil Defence flood response and evacuation assistance – from 700 in 2019/2020 to 2000 in 2022.

And those figures are in the absence of international tourists, which typically account for between 6% to 8% of LandSAR operations.

NZ LandSAR chief executive Carl McOnie ​ said LandSAR was involved in about 30% of the reported wilderness search and rescue operations in New Zealand.

“We've seen a lift in the number of, and the severity of, the search and rescue operations in the last 12 months,” he said.

The types of incidents in which “if we hadn’t been, things could have gone really badly, or they already have ended badly” had certainly increased in the past year, he said.

McOnie was unable to say exactly why there had been an increase in severe incidents.

“Trends with search and rescue are very hard to define ... it depends so much on weather and other events.”

While there had been a rise in participation in outdoor activities nationally, around a quarter of search and rescue operations were actually in an urban environment.

“Everyone thinks Search and Rescue is just back country, but it’s not. It’s also front country, farmland and urban environments.”

These might be for people who were “despondent”, with suicidal thoughts, brain injuries, cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's, or dementia, for instance.

McOnie said the organisation was about to kick off research with police into urban SAR operations that hadn’t “ended well” in the past few years.

LandSAR works with the Mountain Safety Council, ACC data, and coroner's inquiry data to look into prevention strategies.

While LandSAR figures showed a jump in severe incidents, NZ Mountain Safety Council spokesperson said there was “no evidence to suggest there is an increase in outdoor land-based safety incidents”.

Mountain Safety Council statistics, which were supplied by the Coronial Services, showed that over the same period of the LandSAR figures, in 2021 and 2022 there were 8 fatalities, of which 6 were tramping, one was rock climbing, and another back country skiing.

Over 2020-21 there were 7 fatalities, and in 2019-2020, 14 fatalities.

“Search and rescue in the outdoors has been either slightly reducing or stagnant over the last four or five years,” said council chief executive Mike Daisley.

He said that was against a backdrop of a 15% increase on pre-Covid-19 levels of participation in outdoor activities such as tramping, as measured by Sport NZ’s Active NZ survey.

“A lot of activities are seeing reductions … what we are seeing in our sector, in the outdoor sector, is an increase in participation that's stuck around [even after the lockdown periods came to an end],” Daisley said.

He said the data had shown that international visitors accounted for the “vast minority” of search and rescue incidents.

Nelson Search and Rescue volunteer Sherp Tucker said more people were rescued by helicopter now, mainly because they were carrying Personal Locator Beacons.