Friday, 14 January, 2022
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12531038-DL02-22
Extended flood coverage
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48-page liftout Property Guide
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INSIDE
PR OP ER TY
Ben to the rescue By Margie Maccoll
QFES swift water rescue technician Ben Walker to the rescue in Gympie.
Picture: ROB MACCOLL
When floodwaters engulfed the Gympie region on the weekend and “things went pear-shaped“ Noosa swift water rescue technician Ben Walker was called back from his holidays to assist. The Maroochydore-based Queensland Fire and Emergency officer, who is a lead firefighter specially trained for swift water rescue, began his shift at 6pm, then was tasked from one rescue to the next until 8pm the next day. On their way to evacuate residents from their flooded houses near Curra, Ben and colleagues happened upon a man stranded not far off the Bruce Highway and with help from the local team waded through flood waters to rescue him. “We saw a guy in a tree (one or two metres high off the water). His car had been washed off the highway. He got our attention with his phone light,“ Ben said. Just nearby they met a motorbike rider walking through floodwaters about a kilometre from his bike and brought him to safety before making their way to the flooded houses. “People were making calls from quite a lot of houses. Floods coming through your house in the middle of the night is not the best of circumstances,“ he said. “We had nowhere we could take them. We could only take them to the servo up the road and that was already full. The water had receded so we left them with safety strategies“. “We got tasked all over the countryside to various jobs. Sadly one was to locate the young man who passed away (when his car washed off the road). At least he got located so his family could start the grieving process.“ Ben said the volume of rain and the terrain made the work difficult. “It was a phenomenal amount of rain and it just kept raining,“ he said.
Surf rescue push By Phil Jarratt
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“Simplicity is the essence of ingenuity, despite the intricacy of much of the equipment with which modern life is surrounded,” an unknown author wrote in the March 1921 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine. He was talking about the development of the Torpedo Buoy surf rescue device, but he might well have been referring to the back-tothe-future push around the world a century later for the humble rescue tube, life ring and other land-based life-saving devices. This is particularly pertinent for Noosa, where the recent TC Seth swell almost took a life at Dolphin Point, and a group of our most respected and skilled surfers is calling for the immediate reintroduction of rescue tube stations at the most dangerous rock outcrops used by launching surfers and spectators. Noosa Boardriders Club, which includes the
best shortboarders in town, has donated $1000 to the Noosa World Surfing Reserve to get the rescue tube project up and running, and local surf life saving authorities are currently doing due diligence on the proposals. “That tools used by sea-beach life-savers should be designed without complexity is especially fitting, for when man becomes an aquatic animal, he takes simplicity as his keynote; his equipment is usually nil, and his garb is reduced to the conventional minimum,” wrote our unknown author a century ago. Interestingly, just a handful of years before these words appeared in Popular Mechanics, John Donovan, proprietor of Laguna House, took simplicity as his keynote in providing protection for his guests who wanted to swim in the surf. From my book Place of Shadows: “While Noosa in those years had far too few surfing
visitors to sponsor a lifesaving club, Donovan paid for the installation of a safety reel at the foot of the sandhill in front of his establishment, and a team from the Royal Life Saving Society came up from Brisbane to perform an instructional drill at Easter, 1915. “The single reel, and a few men who knew how to use it, seemed adequate to the task for a decade until the Cooroy-Tewantin road was widened and sealed, and at Christmas 1925, more than 200 vehicles roared down the escarpment to Parkyn’s Jetty, where the launch took them downriver to try out this surfing caper. When the numbers were even higher the following Christmas, the Shire Council deemed there were now enough visitors to justify the employment of a Royal Society lifesaver to conduct patrols over the three peak days at a cost of £14.” Invented in Sydney in 1906, and still used
in surf life saving carnivals today, the belt and reel system had serious flaws but still saved countless lives until it was superseded by the rescue board and the rubber duckie in the 1990s. In the US, however, lifeguards remained committed to the flotation device which was swum out to the victim, particularly after the invention of the Peterson Tube in 1932. Preston “Pete” Peterson, 19, was already California’s best boardrider and a design innovator and craftsman in both surfboards and life saving equipment for the Santa Monica lifeguards, where he worked. After the acceptance of his prototype tube, in 1935 Peterson produced an inflatable rescue tube with snap hooks moulded onto one end and a 14-inch strap on the other. He further improved his design in the late 1960s with the production of closed-cell foam rubber. Continued page 3