The bottom line: the number one risk factor when caught in an avalanche is asphyxiation suffocation. Airbags are proven to help you stay on top of sliding debris and prevent you from getting trapped below. So, the risk of suffocation is minimized. Avalanche airbags also provide some head protection during an avalanche.
Naturally, having a giant balloon up and around your head will provide a bit of collision prevention. This potentially decreases search time if you do end up buried. I have to reiterate, airbags are not a tool that allows you to venture out when avalanche danger is high.
Use caution and make good decisions. Remember your avalanche safety training. Second, there is a bit of a weight penalty. Owning an avalanche airbag pack is definitely a good idea if you venture into the backcountry. If you can afford one. The ball remains above the snow—or so you hope.
Rescuers follow the cord to the victim. It sounds like a lot of shoveling The avalanche ball is essentially an update to the original avalanche cords from days of old. Neither the original nor this more modern reincarnation have any documented saves. Don't confuse this with an avalanche air bag, above, which prevents you from being buried in the first place.
This website requires javascript to function correctly. Learn how to enable javascript. Avalanche Airbags. Many companies make packs that are compatible with ABS airbag engines.
In collaboration with ABS brand avalanche airbags, they kept track of all the people that reported being caught in an avalanche with an avalanche airbag, whether they successfully deployed it or not until the fall of After the fall of , the responsibility of this data collection has been passed on to the various national avalanche centers.
Since most of people caught survive anyway, the number most of us are probably more interested in is what percentage would survive who would have otherwise been KILLED. At the International Snow Science Workshop last fall, the well-respected Canadian researcher, Pascal Haegeli presented some preliminary results of his more up-to-date study on the effectiveness of avalanche airbag packs. He performed the study like standard medical research in which he compared the mortality rate of the treatment group with the control group people who wore airbags vs.
As I mentioned before, there is a wide variety in the severity of the avalanche that can catch people. In other words, he wanted to fairly compare the success of the technology, warts and all. If you look at it with a glass-half-full approach, a deployed airbag saved about half of those who would have otherwise died. If you look it with a glass-half-empty approach, you would say that half of the people who deployed airbags died anyway.
For various reasons, not all people who wore airbags were able to deploy them. Pascal was careful to mention that his study presented perhaps a worst-case scenario because, he eliminated less serious avalanches from the analysis and included only multiple burial incidents, and thus the data was biased towards larger, less survivable avalanches.
Indeed, in the April issue of the Avalanche Review, Jonathan Shefftz did a great summary of five different published data sets mostly from older European data sets and he found roughly similar numbers. Wearing an avalanche airbag would have saved from 35 to 81 people out of who would have otherwise died. The average of the 5 studies is So, it seems that in real-world experience, wearing an avalanche airbag will possibly save a little more than half of those who would have otherwise died.
At least from my perspective, saving half of avalanche fatalities is pretty darn good. Avalanche airbags are the best technology we have seen come along including the beacon.
Although it's impossible to directly compare beacons with avalanche airbags because it's an apples-and-oranges comparison, most experts agree that the avalanche airbag will likely save more lives. My pet peeve with this issue is that people who argue about the numbers often leave the most important part out of the discussion--terrain.
There have been a number of prominent accidents in which the victim with a deployed airbag died because he was either strained through thick trees and rocks, deposited in a terrain trap, buried deeply or went over a cliff. Nothing works. In other words, choose terrain with no obstacles, no terrain traps or sharp transitions and avoid large avalanche paths.
For instance, when we added seat belts and airbags to cars, yes fatalities decreased, but it also allowed us to drive faster, farther, crazier and talk on our mobile phones at the same time. In avalanche airbag case, we will also get more powder, more fun, and more risk in the bargain. My best guess is that avalanche airbag packs will probably save a little more than half of those who would have otherwise have died in an avalanche.
They will never save all of them because 1 out of 4 will likely die from trauma of hitting trees and rocks on the way down and an additional 1 out of 4 will probably end up in a terrain trap deep burial , buried by a secondary avalanche or caught in an avalanche that does not travel far enough for the inverse segregation process to work larger objects rise to the surface. In addition, people will increase their exposure to risk because of the perception of increased safety, which will cancel out some, but not all, of the effectiveness of avalanche airbags.
As usual, our choice of terrain is far more important than rescue gear. Un-survivable terrain will always be un-survivable. In terrain with few obstacles, terrain traps, sharp transitions and smaller paths, avalanche airbags have the potential to save significantly more than half of those who would have otherwise died.
And that sounds pretty good to me. I am not going to be whiny here, but feel compelled to state that "best guess" numbers aren't always the best way to convey fact. I have looked extensively into ABS packs because it is one of the products I clinic shops on in my line of work. I get these questions all day long when speaking with shop employees, and need to say that you seem to be downplaying the benefits of an ABS pack in an avalanche situation.
I understand that you want to keep folks from feeling like superman, but to talk down on a technology that has been proven to save lives is a long reach. I have found you guys to be extremely credible in the past, but feel this type of spin on the topic makes me wonder if your end goal is to save lives, or something else.
Bruce's Note: As we can see, doing statistics on avalanche airbags is tricky business because it all depends on the design of the study and how you filter the data. Pascal chose to only include those who were "seriously involved" and exclude those in which the avalanche airbag probably did not make a difference in the outcome.
And as such it skews the data towards less survivable avalanches. In addition, he included the modern Canadian and U. Controlling for these variables, the risk-inducing logic holds little water. We should expand avi courses to include this discourse. Education, not leaving your airbag pack at home, is the solution. One early result was that non-deployment remains the biggest limitation to effectiveness. Many people, Haegeli said, buy an airbag pack and assume they will know how to use it when the time comes.
He encourages backcountry users to think of it just like a beacon, which requires ample practice to master. However, newer packs from major manufacturers are both lighter and cheaper. The BCA Float 2. The Ortovox Ascent adds just 1. Overall weights have dropped almost in half and, similarly, prices have come down too. However, with removable CO2 canisters and new battery-powered systems, this limitation has almost fully disappeared.
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