Going into the backcountry and not being educated on avalanches and avalanche safety is a dangerous proposition that gets people killed every year, said Bruce Tremper, the Director of the Forest Service Utah Avalanche Center at the avalanche awareness clinic Friday at the Natural History Museum of Utah.
“If you’re recreating in the backcountry, walking your dog, taking hikes in the snow, hunting in the snow, you need to be educated about avalanches,” Tremper said.
Tremper said an average of four people in Utah and 30 nationwide die every year in avalanches, and one reason is because they are not educated in how to recreate in avalanche areas.
“About 50 percent of all avalanche deaths happen because that person didn’t take an avalanche safety course or have the right equipment that could have saved their life,” Tremper said.
During his presentation, Tremper covered topics such as how to identify areas that avalanches could occur, how to deal with those areas and what to do if caught in an avalanche. He also discussed equipment that is available to help save lives in the event of an avalanche.
“Avalanche beacons have gotten much better over the past 10 years. It is much easier to find somebody with beacons nowadays. The avalanche airbags, which you deploy when caught in an avalanche to help float you to the top of the avalanche as well as create an air pocket for you if you’re buried, are probably the biggest advancements in technology to help save lives,” Tremper said.
Tremper said saving more lives is not necessarily an issue with technology, as it has improved to a point that it saves as many lives as it can, but that the real problem is communication.
“The main issue is communication with people about avalanches. We’re doing a good job forecasting, every day we put up avalanche information on our website to tell people what to look out for, but they key is getting that information to the people that need it. The people most at risk are people not looking at that information. We don’t have a forecasting problem we have a marketing problem,” Tremper said.
The Utah Avalanche Center runs classes throughout the year to educate people about avalanches and avalanche safety.
“We teach a lot of avalanche awareness classes, about 15,000 people a year in Utah,” Tremper said.
About 40 people attended the presentation, including the First LEGO League team from Eastwood Elementary School.
The First LEGO League competition theme for this year is natural disasters and requires teams to choose a natural disaster and help come up with a solution to a problem natural disasters impose.
“Our natural disaster that we chose is avalanches,” said Curtis Doubek, one of the team chaperones from Eastwood Elementary. “The team needs to come up with a solution and they came to the presentation for more information and resource knowledge for their project.”
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