In order to procrastinate from actually doing my physics homework, I was distracted by the law of thermodynamics. Which led me down a rabbit hole of natural disasters, before I stumbled upon the 2003 tragedy that struck Albertan kids. I’ve read about it before, but the only thoughts that consumed me, this time around, was “What more could have been done?” This is the question I sought to answer.
Through my readings in the articles I’ve linked, what I found is a lot of nothing. Other than the fact that once you’re under an avalanche, you are done for, there’s not much you can actually do to save a person this fast. You have mere minutes to save them if a large enough air pocket doesn’t exist. When you are someone who isn’t in the wreck, and instead a rescuer, you have mere seconds to decide who lives and who dies, and those people’s lives are lost just beneath your feet.
I found this entire ordeal horrifying. How could we, as a society, let all of these kids, who clearly had the money and the means to afford good technology to keep them safe, succumb to a snowfall like this? I think that farther than it was the fault of all natural disasters, the fact that the technology we had in that period wasn’t enough to save them, disappoints me.
We rely so heavily on technology as a society, we live in nothing more than a technocrity in which we have people who are glued to screens and tablets. The same people who then rely on good technology to keep them alive when they go out. If even trained skiers weren’t safe, then is anyone really?
The major lesson to be learnt here is that the minute you get cocky, take off your jacket while skiing and don’t understand the actual meaning behind what we do in life. That’s the moment your life becomes meaningless. We’ve seen that happen in less abstract examples, where people bank their lives on tech and it fails them. Leaving them to freeze under the icy surface of the avalanche. Be wary of relying on anything in the world, before it topples you and traps you in a place that will soon be, your untimely, icy grave.
More reading:
https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/buried-alive-an-avalanche-survivor-breaks-his-silence/
https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/avalanches-school-trip-tragedy