Not a clue.

Esav Benyamin

Esav Benyamin

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Wait four days for rescue, family told

TAKE two British expats, a pair of teenage kids, one badly bogged ute and four days of rain and what do you get?
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Not all that far from civilization, outback Australia, went down an unpaved road and got caught in the mud when it rained.

Not an area with lots of rescue equipment available, I guess but

Living off bottles of water and a few meagre sandwiches, made as a snack for what was meant to be a day's worth of driving, they whiled away the hours planning how to escape.

They tried several times to get themselves out of the predicament, even trying to dig the vehicle out with their bare hands. "My husband and I even walked for six hours trying to get out and left the two boys in the car with the dog," Mrs Emptage said.

"But we couldn't walk any further because our feet were cut and bruised and blistered and we had to go back."
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Minimal supplies, minimal gear, no knowledge of the terrain, no knowledge of survival techniques. Probably lucky it wasn't worse or they might not have made it.

Notice they did have cellphone communication and laptop entertainment. Ah, the modern world! :D
 
"They said: 'You've got yourself in there, you'll have to get yourself out'," she said.

I love it. Must be an Aussie thing.:D So, is "triple O" like AAA?
 
Esav,

I sent you a PM about this thread. I forgot to refer to this link in my PM...:o

Thanks.

Yellow Lab
 
Well that's a new one sorta...I'm not gonna instantly jump and call them complete idiots...have to think about this.

...when their satnav system told them to take a turn west of Bourke on to an unsealed road.
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What is an unsealed road? Does that just meen a road that is not closed?
 
The could have traded those sammich squares for a pig roast!
 
I don't think they were idiots, just seriously naive. We see that here too with local people who should know their own backyard but don't.

I took unsealed road to mean unpaved, that's why they got bogged down with the rains.

Yellow Lab, I knew what you were referring to. :)
 
not a clue at all. that's what you get when you blindly listen to a SatNav rather than use some common sense.

you just do NOT drive along unsealed outback roads inside of ~24-48 hours of rain. the Australian landscape turns quite odd with rain. unless you have a purpose-built mud-runner, stay off the black soil when it's wet. even with a dedicated mudrunner, think twice.

in any event, that far out, i'd speak to someone local before heading onto any dirt tracks even in the dry.

i'm in the SES and i've had to go bush to find idiots of this calibre in the past. it's a lot of effort and a lot of hassle and it can all be avoided if people take just a little bit of responsibility for themselves.

"My husband and I even walked for six hours trying to get out and left the two boys in the car with the dog," Mrs Emptage said.
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idiots. last time i was down near Wilcannia you could barely move for the snakes.
 
We have a term for tourist who know better than all the warnings. They are refered to as satistics.
There is a huge amount information and warning outside the cities and "normal" rural areas.
And Wilcannia is in that category.
An unsealed road is one is a dirt road. Roads outside of rural areas can be cut for weeks.
( I'm calling a rural areas places where you might expect to see a tractor working a paddock. Not a pastoral cattle station of 50 000 acres upwards.)
My cousin has a cattle station 213 000 acres most the time it is just him there. His Mum and Dad live next door 17miles away on 228 000acres. The roads to his place can be cut for weeks at a time For Aunty Therese to get to her grandsons 2nd birthday last year Uncle Tommy put her on the pillion of the quad drove her to the flooded creek she waded across ( the bottom of the creek was to soft for vehicles) Geoff picked her up on the other side then on his bike back to his house then drove her the four hours into town where she caught a bus to the next major town, then a puddle jumper six hours to a major city then another four hours on a commercial airline to just down the road from my place. How big do you blokes think this country is??
In fact his roads can be cut by flood waters for weeks at a time ( like last Sept) when the rain fell 1000klm away. The flood took two weeks to get to Geoff.
I'm starting to think that God is keeping with the times and instead of plagues that are conquered by the UN relief efforts, He now plays with the GPS system to cull the stupid.
Or is that a bit harsh????
Carl
 
GPS is pretty reliable but you still need to understand where it's taking you. I remember I had one of the first computer map programs. Following it from one part of New York City to another gave the interesting result of traveling the wrong way on many one-way streets.

Watch the GPS but watch the road, watch the sky, be prepared for a delay.

Australia is like the US in that many people are urban but the wild places are immense and very wild indeed.
 
Esav Benyamin said:
Australia is like the US in that many people are urban but the wild places are immense and very wild indeed.
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a lot of the Urban people struggle with how big this place is and just how far it is between towns sometimes. heck, up where i am it could easily take 6 hours to walk to the next property house.

shit happens in the bush. if you're not prepared for it, you're often dead.
 
shit happens in the bush. if you're not prepared for it, you're often dead

Can I borrow that?
 
glee said:
shit happens in the bush. if you're not prepared for it, you're often dead

Can I borrow that?
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:thumbup: go wild. :thumbup:

i'll just need 98% of your total lifetime earnings and your first three children as royalty payments.:D

(seriously, go wild.)

edit: i LIVE out in the Australian Outback (Longreach, central QLD). i don't drive out of town without a FAK, water bottles, knife and torch in the car. I almost always carry between 3 and 5 litres of water and a bite to eat even if i'm just heading up the road to Winton (~180kms). i grew up in the city, but i adapted to life in the bush pretty quickly.

the main part of that adaptation was learning proper respect for teh country.

these ignorant tourist types cause a lot of hassles.
 
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Joben said:
What is an unsealed road? Does that just meen a road that is not closed?
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dirt. unpaved. not asphalt or tarmac.

or like the sticker on the back of my truck says "Paved roads are just another example of wasted taxpayer dollars!" :D

did a dingo eat the baby?
 
I google on "australia outback emergency equipment" and found some general info in the
first few links: some tourist info with lots of warnings but No Kit as regards getting out
of a ditch etc.

I found this very slow link with "vehicle recovery" (magic words), and it did list ropes,
winches, chains, high lift jack, etc. It has other survival info as well.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6388740/Australia-Outback-Aids-to-Survival
With a dial-up line, I had to try at least 3 times to get the page loaded;
www.scribd.com is always slow.

Relating this to the Englanders, from tourist info, they would have seen warnings of
road closures and other info, but no specifics on "vehicle recovery" kit.
For dirt road travelers, this could be made more prominent, with a list, and referral
links to web pages that explained safe usage And pictures of a vehicle in a ditch,
with Englanders drying up to mummies. Sorry I got carried away.

Googling, there is all the info needed, I suppose. Communication in Oz is well covered.
IIrc they have a HF network with emergency operators, which USA does not have
with a possible exception of marine radio operators by U.S. Coast Guard.
 
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glee said:
"They said: 'You've got yourself in there, you'll have to get yourself out'," she said.

I love it. Must be an Aussie thing.:D So, is "triple O" like AAA?
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i think it's like 9-1-1 here in the states, and i think it's 9-9-9 in the UK.
 
Esav Benyamin said:
Australia is like the US in that many people are urban but the wild places are immense and very wild indeed.
Click to expand...

Somewhat true but almost the entire Oz population lives around the edges of the continent and a large majority of those in cities on the east coast.

The centre of the country is not only vast but very deadly, especially if you're stupid, like the people in this story. I like the part where they decided to get out of the car and start walking. In the outback, doing that is somewhat akin to playing Russian roulette, but with three chambers loaded.

They followed the sat nav onto an unsealed road in the outback after rain. Retards. Evolution in action.

As somebody up there said, the "soil" is very strange stuff indeed out there. It can go from stuff like talcum powder to something like thick grease with just a little water added.

A lack of knowledge is no excuse, even the maps you can buy have warnings written all over them.
 
check out the ordeal of Robert Bogucki- an American who survived an epic lost in the bush ordeal. NB there are farms here that are bigger than Texas. Also there are are incidents of a satnav leading people to drive their car into a canal in the UK! So what chance would they have out there? You are advised to stay with the vehicle.
 
I love Aussies and South Africans. When you ask them about something related to survival, it's just no B.S. all the way, no sugarcoating. :D
 
This story makes four (off the top of my head) where a GPS lead to people being lost, two of those cases ending tragically. I think far too many people believe that the GPS is infallible when that's obviously not the case.
 
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