Avalanche fataly incident report - Smithers, BC - 02-26-11

[pureantigravity]

Thanks for sharing. You are the type of buddy I'd like to skiing with in the back country.

Your account is insight that we can all use to be better prepared. Take care.

[Shorty_J]

I have not been able to find anything online about this, however my wife worked for a company that went through alot of that same beacon, and she said that they had a problem with the battery connectors(?) on a very large number of them at one point and talked me out of buying one and said there was no way she would use one.

I looked for documented problems online at the time and I do not recall ever finding anything. Google search isn't turning up any info to back this up as ever having been a problem though. It was a few years ago now, and as we all know memory fades on the details over time. I'll ask her about it tommorrow.

You kept your shit together and some one is alive that otherwise would not have been had it not been for you. Good on ya.

Thanks Kevin. I'd be curious to hear if you find any info on the 3000. I know I'll never use it again either way, but it would still be good to know.

[Ski to Be]

Since writing that report I have found out that the second victim was buried 2m down.[/QUOTE]

Then you definitely used your time correctly. The odds of surviving buried that deep are extremely low and you would have needed many shovelers to have had a chance saving him. Your situation was the worst case scenario. One day hopefully air bags will be standard equipment along with shovels, beacons , & probes. The price needs to come down a bit for them to be widely used

[Shorty_J]

Another thought: How does this potential battery issue affect a beacon like the 3+ that only uses 1 battery? Is it now more susceptible to this battery problem, or is my case a freak occurance or a bad battery connection?

[time2clmb]

Thanks Kevin. I'd be curious to hear if you find any info on the 3000. I know I'll never use it again either way, but it would still be good to know.

I tried more googling but the only thing I was able to find was a recall due to stress cracks in the case, and a few obscure references on other bb's to battery compartment issues. The latter of which sounds similar to what I was talking about. I'll ask my wife about it but won't be speaking with her until tommorrow night as i'm away right now.

Try not to second guess anything as by the sound of it even with the best beacon the outcome would most likely have been the same given the burial depths etc. It would be good to know however what the problem may have been with the beacon, and i'm trying to give a starting point of what to look in to.

I dunno but it seems strange for the batteries to deplete competely from the cold over such a short period of time unless it was super cold and windy.... I know they do crap out in the cold, just seems odd to happen that fast.

[Shorty_J]

It wasn't very cold, but it was VERY windy and I didn't put the beacon back in the holster while digging out the first victim... so it was exposed for some time.

[PaulB]

As anyone who has taken an avy course knows, at this point we were one step away from the worst case scenario possible… 1 person on top, 3 caught in a slide

I've been in this situation, and it is a very bad feeling when you realize that if you have to search and dig, you probably aren't going to be able to get to everyone. Good on you for being methodical, doing the best search possible, and then making sure yourself and the other survivor were safe.

I have not been able to find anything online about this, however my wife worked for a company that went through alot of that same beacon, and she said that they had a problem with the battery connectors(?) on a very large number of them at one point and talked me out of buying one and said there was no way she would use one.

I looked for documented problems online at the time and I do not recall ever finding anything. Google search isn't turning up any info to back this up as ever having been a problem though. It was a few years ago now, and as we all know memory fades on the details over time. I'll ask her about it tommorrow.

I tried more googling but the only thing I was able to find was a recall due to stress cracks in the case, and a few obscure references on other bb's to battery compartment issues. The latter of which sounds similar to what I was talking about.

Ortovox recalled their M1 & M2 beacons in 2005 to replace the battery door. The root cause was variations in battery dimensions between manufacturers, which resulted in some batteries becoming loose inside the battery compartment after a hard impact. There were various reports on TTips around that time about similar problems with various beacons. The general consensus was to carefully check how different brands of batteries fit into your beacon and stick with the one that provides the tightest fit.

[time2clmb]

Ortovox recalled their M1 & M2 beacons in 2005 to replace the battery door. The root cause was variations in battery dimensions between manufacturers, which resulted in some batteries becoming loose inside the battery compartment after a hard impact. There were various reports on TTips around that time about similar problems with various beacons. The general consensus was to carefully check how different brands of batteries fit into your beacon and stick with the one that provides the tightest fit.

The problem I am thinking of was most definately with the Red Barryvox beacons.

[Ramsey]

Shorty... What batteries did you have in there? Brand, age, etc?

[johngenx]

Thank you for posting this. It takes courage, and I appreciate it. You really kept your shit together and saved your own life as well as someone else.

As for the beacon issue, wow, I'm dismayed by the difficulty you had. I can't imagine having a companion buried and suddenly my beacon was blank/silent. Fuck.

[Jonathan S.]

My pieps dsp does the same thing, and to be honest it's fucking ridiculous that the manufacturers haven't at least recognized this as an issue (as far as I know.)

No, your DSP does something entirely different: displaying an extremely pessimistic remaining % despite being able to keep running for a long time. Kind of like how some cars show you’re running on empty even though a lot still remains in the tank.

For more general background on battery meters, see p. 7 here:
http://www.americanavalancheassociat...28_4_LoRes.pdf

The person who pointed out to me how low my batteries were at the end of the day, also had a Pieps (DSP, I think). I don't think the failure is actually the beacon, but rather, the batteries.

Having said that, having battery failure during a search when the unit displayed 70% at the beginning of the day was not even a remote possibility of something I'd have to deal with, in my mind.

I know manufacturers tell you to change batteries when they get to 50%, but I'm really thinking after this it should happen around 90%. Or at the very least, someone should be doing tests of this kind of situation on ALL beacons in the future. I would highly recommend this to all users until the reasons for this failure are fully understood.

The article referenced above incorporated the findings from just such tests. The bottomline is that normal alkaline batteries (unless they’re somehow defective) starting out at 70% (or even way lower) are going to be just fine throughout the entire day (and then some) for even a really a long search, even in really cold weather.

We were told 90% when I took Avy 1 from Three Sisters Backcountry two years ago.

Before a multi-day trip, sure. Before a daytrip? Utterly pointless. Like filling up your gas tank at 90% even when you’re just driving around town.

I have not been able to find anything online about this, however my wife worked for a company that went through a lot of that same beacon, and she said that they had a problem with the battery connectors(?) on a very large number of them at one point and talked me out of buying one and said there was no way she would use one.

I have heard anecdotes about battery connection problems in older units, although then again, since the Opto 3000 has been discontinued now for four years and the Barryvox warranty is five years, almost all of those units are now older units.

Another thought: How does this potential battery issue affect a beacon like the 3+ that only uses 1 battery? Is it now more susceptible to this battery problem, or is my case a freak occurance or a bad battery connection?

Has to be the latter.

I dunno but it seems strange for the batteries to deplete competely from the cold over such a short period of time unless it was super cold and windy.... I know they do crap out in the cold, just seems odd to happen that fast.

Not strange but impossible (unless the batteries were defective).

Ortovox recalled their M1 & M2 beacons in 2005 to replace the battery door.

The CPSC forced Ortovox to send out replacement battery compartment doors, even though the claim was only one instance of an M2 losing power because of a hard slap to the housing, and this was never replicated by anyone.

[Shorty_J]

Shorty... What batteries did you have in there? Brand, age, etc?

I had Duracell alkaline batteries that were from last season. I believe I changed them near the end of the season, but can't recall for sure.

Jonathan's article in the post below suggests staying away from "batteries whose names are bit too intruiging (e.g.,Duracell)". I'm not sure how someone is supposed to interpret the statement "a bit too intruiguing", but I was under the impression that Duracell was a quality battery brand. I specefically bought them over generic alkaline options.

[Jonathan S.]

Jonathan's article in the post below suggests staying away from "batteries whose names are bit too intruiging (e.g.,Duracell)". I'm not sure how someone is supposed to interpret the statement "a bit too intruiguing", but I was under the impression that Duracell was a quality battery brand. I specefically bought them over generic alkaline options.

You didn't read the next two lines that followed, which are part of the same sentence.
Here's the entire paragraph including the preceding sentences:

"First and foremost, although every beacon owner should already know this one by now, no note on avalanche beacons is complete without the longtime admonition to use only regular alkaline batteries. That means no rechargeable batteries (of any kind) and no lithium batteries. Also stay
away from batteries whose names are a bit too intriguing (e.g., Duracell PowerPix), which are often *not* standard alkaline chemistry."

[Shorty_J]

Jonathan... how can you be so sure this issue has to be due to a bad battery connection? Your article states the standard is transmitting for 200 hours and subsequent 1 hour of searching. If the becean regularly shows apparent battery power drops of 30-40% over the course of the day, and I find myself at about 40% before I start searching, that should provide me with something like 25 minutes of seraching time. Now factor in that I had the beacon dangling in the cold wind while digging up the first person and maybe that has reduced even further.

As I stated in the original email, I entertained the possibility that I damaged the unit while it was swinging around attached to me, and this is still a possibility. But if it's just a battery connection, why can't I repeat this behaviour be smacking the beacon around right now? If the connection is bad it should be easy to repeat. And how did it just start working again since the accident? It's showing 65% power right now, and when I turned it on last week to do my "revert to send" test it showed 61%. In other words, the beacon thinks I've got 4% more power than it did last week.

[Shorty_J]

You didn't read the next two lines that followed, which are part of the same sentence.
Here's the entire paragraph including the preceding sentences:

"First and foremost, although every beacon owner should already know this one by now, no note on avalanche beacons is complete without the longtime admonition to use only regular alkaline batteries. That means no rechargeable batteries (of any kind) and no lithium batteries. Also stay
away from batteries whose names are a bit too intriguing (e.g., Duracell PowerPix), which are often *not* standard alkaline chemistry."

My appologies... I misread that as two different batteries... "Duracell" and "Powerpix".

So my regular Duracell's are appropriate then.

[Jonathan S.]

Battery rebound occurs in lots of devices, and I've seen changes like 61% > 65% in beacons just by turning the beacon off at the end of a long tour, waiting a second or so, then turning it back on.
I've seen some reliable reports of battery connectors going bad on old Opto 3000 units, so based on what happened, that sounds like prime suspect #1. But of course I can't prove that beyond a reasonable doubt.
But [non-defective] batteries being drawn down so much during a tour that they go from above 50% to unit shutdown during a search? Impossible. And just because some models exhibit a big drop-off over a certain range, no, that can't be extrapolated to other portions of the range. In other words, if a beacon drops 30% during a tour, that doesn't mean that 30% of the battery life has really been used up.
I hesitate to get into some of the details b/c I don't want to encourage people to start cutting it close, heading out for a tour with 40%, 30%, 20% (kind of like driving around with my Subaru Legacy until the display reports 70 miles to go with the yellow light coming on). But like I said in the article, 50% is a fine rule of thumb for daytrips -- there's just no way the beacon is going to use up all that.

[Shorty_J]

I guess what I'm suggesting is that maybe the 70% I got at the beginning was wrong. I know that I sometimes turn on my gps with used batteries, it shows 4 bars out of 4 initially, and then within a short amount of time it's showing 2 bars. I'm not suggesting this is accurate, but rather suggesting that the first guess of battery power indicator may be spurious.

I opened up the battery compartment just now and the battery connections look intact and un-corroded, and the batteries loo fine as well and have an expiry date of MAR 2015.

I respect your knowledge, but given the magnitude of the result of this device failure, and the fact that I can't reproduce it or explain it easily by the mechanisms you've suggested, I feel that using words like "impossible" is a bit presumptuous at this time. Maybe you're right, but maybe not, and the reason I posted this here is so that we can possibly learn something from the event, and if there is something fundamentally wrong it would be great if we figured it out.

I've contacted Mammut today and haven't heard back, but I feel like them looking into this might be a bit of a conflict of interest. I'd be happy to ship the beacon to you, Jonathan, if you have the means or desire to test it and play around with it to help figure out what happened and determine if this might be a problem in other beacons.

[LeeLau]

FWIW Shorty. When i practise searching and rescuing I put the beacon back into a pocket of the jacket after locating the transmitting beacon. It's become a habit. I do that because its too easy to hit/whack your own beacon while moving around. Also if another slide comes down while you're recovering the other beacon, at least your own beacon isn't vulnerable to being ripped off.

Not criticizing by any means. Just outlining something I do as a habit.

[wendigo]

Shorty_J - Thanks for posting. I'm sorry to hear about the events that took place, but greatly appreciate the dialogue, so that others can learn from this.

[Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer]

Shorty_J - Do you know what type leashes where on the skis of the various parties? Where they break-away leashes intending to break or permanent leashes not intended to break away (e.g., breakable zip tie v. perlon nylon cord, for example)? I am just curious. Feel free to PM if you don't want to post.

Thanks in advance.

[Shorty_J]

I believe the leashes that were being used are the stock leashes that come with Comforts.

[Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer]

Thanks for following up. I didn't realize old Comforts came with leashes. Maybe someone more insightful can elaborate on whether they are supposed to tear away or not. I know some after-market leashes (e.g., B&D leashes) are designed to break-away after a certain amount of force (i.e., using zip ties of varying strengths).

[Jonathan S.]

I've contacted Mammut today and haven't heard back, but I feel like them looking into this might be a bit of a conflict of interest. I'd be happy to ship the beacon to you, Jonathan, if you have the means or desire to test it and play around with it to help figure out what happened and determine if this might be a problem in other beacons.

Email from a member of my ski patrol (who's also an avy instructor and electrical engineer -- you should see his home office with bin organizers stacked everywhere containing all sorts of little parts) follows below.

BTW, the irony of all this is that I've been making some suggested modifications to an upcoming TAR article on when to retire an old beacon, and even discussed it in person with the snow ranger author on Sunday.
Speaking of which, our course met with him and a colleague after hours of rescue practice (and skinning up to treeline) in a cold steady rain -- challenging rescue conditions for sure. We had gear problems with beacons, shovels, and probes. And that was without the added panic of reality. Where I'm going with this is, please don't accept any of my comments as implying criticism of your actions in any way. You did the best job that could be done under the circumstances, which is better than most of us could do. I also applaud you for coming forward and providing such details so that we can all be better informed.

*****

I don't think that there is anything I could do, particularly if everything looks good and is working fine now. I will suggest the following however as at least food for thought:

1) Regarding the actual usable capacity of the batteries: What were the unit/battery temps when the 70% reading was observed and what were the conditions/temps during the actual field use? You know that capacity readings can be highly inaccurate based on our previous discussions. Transceiver batteries can have a reasonable capacity in normal transmit use in winter conditions beause they are usually kept inside layers of clothing where they are much warmer than outside temps. When used in a search you have several things going against you - a) Current drain is probably much higher b) The units is usually being held outside of clothing and is now exposed to the full effects of the cold which leads to c) Lower available battery capacity due to the cold and d) Earlier activation of low-voltage shutdown due to both the cold reducing the battery terminal voltage and possible temperature effects on shutdown voltage threshold in the transceiver.

2) A proper analysis should include a look at the full battery current path. Are there any other contacts in series with the tabs that actually make physical contact to the batteries and could they have an effect? If you discount corrosion, other than perhaps cold solder joints somewhere in the current path, the only thing that I have heard causing problems with battery contacts is a simple lack of sufficient contact pressure. This can lead to intermittent operation but not a shutdown that will not allow a restart. Bad contact materials that lose their "springiness" over time can cause this as can a design with insufficient pressure to start.

3) There is also a failure mechanism of possible intermittent "shorts". This can be caused by poor assembly, by designs that allow possible bridging current paths in the presence of circuit surface contamination and moisture or by packaging or similar issues with the integrated circuits used.

There are other things of course also, all of which even a well-equipped failure analysis lab may have difficulty with pinning down actual cause and effect.

[Jonathan S.]

Thanks for following up. I didn't realize old Comforts came with leashes. Maybe someone more insightful can elaborate on whether they are supposed to tear away or not.

Depends on the generation. Earlier versions are essentially just webbing with fastex buckles -- I've used them for strap down sleeping pads and the like.
Later generation ("powder leash") has some sort of complicated metal something or other that I still haven't figured out (even though I've assembled my own Dynafit heel units from spare parts). There's also the "guide leash" but I think that comes only with more recent Speed bindings.

[lynchdogger]

Very sad and sobering read. Hang in there Shorty J. Thoughts and prayers to you and to the rest in your party. RIP to the victims. Vibes to the victim's family and friends. Be strong brother.