Somewhere in the hills near Blenheim, a distress signal is going off. The team in the Rescue Co-ordination Centre springs into action. A helicopter is sent out, flying across the Cook Strait from Wellington, rushing to the aid of a lost or injured tramper, perhaps?
Instead it is an old and unwanted personal locator beacon, likely partially crushed, pinging from under a pile of rubbish at the dump.
These types of accidental activations have happened about once a week since the start of the year and can sometimes cost thousands of dollars in resources, only for searchers to discover the signal comes from a beacon that hasn’t been properly disposed of.
“We’ve noticed this year in particular a real uptake in beacons going off in landfills,” said Rescue Co-ordinator Centre New Zealand (RCCNZ) search and rescue officer Alex Taylor.
The centre receives hundreds of beacon alerts each year, averaging about 1100 in each of the past two calendar years.
With spring beginning and people throwing out old beacons and replacing them with new ones, it was a good opportunity to give a reminder about the proper way to dispose of them, Taylor said.
According to beacons.org.nz, owners should first ensure their beacon is deregistered on the website and then send it to the RCCNZ office in Lower Hutt so the battery can be safely disabled and disposed of. More information can be found on the website.
Beacons, which cost between $400 and $600 and last for five to 10 years, should not be put in the rubbish.
There are 150,000 registered beacons in New Zealand.
“We don’t know just how many beacons are out there all told,” said Taylor.
Registering them is “incredibly easy to do” and can be done online on the beacons.org.nz website.
RCCNZ is responsible for responding to crashed or missing aircraft incidents, offshore maritime incidents, and personal locator beacon alerts across a wide area stretching from the South Pole to nearly the equator. The range also stretches halfway to Australia and halfway to Chile, and includes some of the Pacific islands and the Antarctic area.
When a beacon alert comes in, the first thing the team will do is check to see if it’s registered, then try to contact the owner or their emergency contacts. If that doesn’t work, they check to see if the location it is pinging at is associated with a known landfill or dump.
Sometimes, depending on the terrain or the orientation of the beacon, the alert can be precise, while other times it may have a margin of error of up to a kilometre. If the antenna is extended, this affects how precise the location is.
If the team cannot verify the alert is accidental, they will send out “assets”, often a rescue helicopter, to search the area it is pinging. The choppers have better equipment for narrowing down alert signals.
If the team knew a beacon had gone off near a landfill, they had to make an assessment as to whether they thought it was accidental or not. Often they would “err on the side of caution if there is any uncertainty whatsoever”.
If they determined a signal was coming from a landfill, they would still monitor the signal for the next few hours to ensure it wasn’t moving.
Of the 35 accidental activations so far this year, 33 were able to be resolved quickly. Two had helicopters deployed, with the most recent being the landfill incident in Blenheim.
The accidental activations could be “quite frustrating” and expensive, with chopper deployments costing at least $4000 an hour.
“It does take resources away from other people who might need it,” Taylor said.
“It’s not about telling people off. We’re here to support people, and ... the way that we can do it most effectively is by not having time and resources dedicated to beacons going off when people aren’t truly in distress.”
Melissa Nightingale is a Wellington-based reporter who covers crime, justice and news in the capital. She joined the Herald in 2016 and has worked as a journalist for 10 years.