Grandma dropped in Arctic in botched rescue dies

I was curious, so I'll just throw this in. From 2009. Interesting stats.

Lives Saved by Helicopter Emergency Medical Services: An Overview of Literature

I've heard various times, 7 to 13 minutes for a pilot going down. The Nazis used Jewish prisoners in barrels of ice water to “research” the question.
I expect for the granny it was the end of the line no matter how short the time. The shock, the lowered body temp., all over with by the time she's warmed up again.

How long you will last in Arctic water depends a lot on your genetic baggage ~ a square heart helps, plus you want to make sure your system doesn't shut down blood flow to your arms and legs instantly.

It's good if your body is set up to INCREASE metabolic rates rather than to DECREASE them.

Even Tropical people can survive for a good 20 minutes. The record in the Far North for someone with the correct baggage is 6.5 hours! She's a med tech in a Norwegian hospital.

The lady was older and sick. She may well have been in the early stages of death anyway. The record shows she could have survived much longer than 8 minutes.

I hope they can all find some peace.

***
Prayers up for all involved.

square heart ??

Tragic, tso think you’ve survived hell only to drown strapped to a pallet. Pure horror I suspect before the great reward, Thanks to Jesus.

A "square heart" is simply one where all four chambers are of roughly equal size ~ you can inherit the condition (very common in the Far North among the Polar Peoples) or you can engage in very long term heavy exercise ~ running marathons is a good way to find out.

The "square heart" pumps more blood faster to the lungs, and also adds to the general strength of the heart thereby improving flow to the arms, legs, etc.

It gives you a decided advantage in Cross Country Skiing.

Look for “athletic heart” ~

They were definitely steaming too fast, look at the wake in the pic

That movement and speed was required for stability. Stop the boat and ship and both will pitch and roll a lot worse. Moving lessens it somewhat but not entirely. Believe it or not the one ship you do not want to be on is a dead in the water {stopped} ship or boat on high seas.

Anytime, peace or war, rough water or calm, moving people between two boats on the water is never a sure thing. I remember one time, coming back from liberty, as the liberty launch full of drunk sailors pulled up to the stern of the carrier, the water was rough enough that the platform attached to the stern of the ship was rising and falling, while independently of that, the liberty launch was rising and falling at a different rate.
The result was, the boat and the deck were sometimes as far as six feet away from each other, and were swinging wildly past each other. We had to time it, so that as the two rushed past each other, they would occasionally pause for a second or two nearly even, and two or three drunk guys would leap over before it began oscillating again.

There were a few instances where people leaped badly or stumbled and either ended up in a heap on the other side, or had people grabbing them to pull them all the way over. People all doing this while completely intoxicated. To this day, I am not only amazed they were trying to get people aboard in this fashion, but also that nobody was seriously hurt or crushed between the vessels.

We were on A MED Cruise in 79. I'd been on boat duty for 24 hours and was fixing to get relieved. We went to Deck House one {quarterdeck} to pick up a load of officers and my relief was to meet me there. I was working on a PB crew. I decided to lay against the windshield while waiting. Big Mistake. Seas were calm but a swell caught the boat. I heard someone yell my first name and Jump so I looked up and dove into the deck just as the windshield was busted by the deck house ladder. I got back to the states a few months later and my dad asked if I had a close call one night. He said my mom woke up yelling Jump.

I did the boat crew a cruise and a half till I got my Crow. All A-Division Snipes E-3 and below were sent T.A.D. boat crew in port on deployments. The liberty boats were ran by two deckapes and a snipe plus after dusk till morning a boat officer.

I know what you mean about getting from boat to deck house platform. I missed once myself and went between the barrel and platform. I was lucky the Coxun saw it happen and kept the boat off me till I got out. The only thing harder is trying to get on a boat from a Jacobs Ladder from a boat boom. On a carrier the boat booms are level with the hanger deck. When we weren't making runs we tied off to a boom and used the Jacobs Ladder to get on and off the boat onto the ship. That usually required leaving one man on the boat so he could drive the boat under the guy coming down. I about got my skull cracked a couple of times trying to get from the Jacobs Ladder onto the boat. Swells are not fun.

It seems the media in this article is trying a blame game for circumstances they know little about. No one wanted to drop the woman but there are too many uncontrollable factors in an at sea transfer even under best of seas.

I've seen wire mesh stretchers used for transferring drunk and disorderly sailors from Liberty Launch to ship. We would put a life jacket on them, tie them in, then place another stretcher on top forming a restraining cage of sorts. We then tied a couple of life jackets to the cage as well. Drunk could not hurt you during transit was the goal. Getting them from the boat onto deck house platform was a P.I.T.A. The sailor for causing such a ride always won a free visit to see the Old Man and usually lost liberty the duration of the cruise, a rank, and some pay.

The one thing I hated with a deep passion was being first on duty when we hit port. That meant I had to launch the boat. Instead of simply climbing on the boat while still on the ship the ships Bosun always made us jump from the aircraft elevator onto the boat. That meant trying to climb out of the wire safety net on the elevator and jumping onto the boat. Then the crane would lower us on down to the water. It was a dangerous manuver.

Passing a stretcher through the door to the boat requires a lot of skill on the part of the boat operator. It’s always easy to second guess the guys on scene, but I wonder if lowering the stretcher from a j-bar davit wouldn’t have been a better idea. From the pics I’ve seen this isn’t one of those monster cruise ships with a 100 ft freeboard.

Even a refueling at sea or a VERT REP can go bad real fast. That's why they practiced Emergency Break Away on the lines but there you just drop the lines and move off. This type of operation did not allow for that nor could it do so practically without dropping the stretcher. My guess is they figured she had the best chance not tied in because the life jacket would right her head and body position if they lost control.

That area they were in is in very unforgiving seas. The closer the transport boat was to the ship the greater the danger to the boat.

Rescues happen every day at sea. Most go good despite all things going wrong. People go to sea and some will die in accidents. That applies to Navy, Merchant Marines, and even cruise ships.

For that matter hitting port real fast would have been the safest thing. A transfer behind a sea wall is much calmer seas. A pier even more so.

I'm just guessing that hand to hand they had more control when they started and determined how to attempt it. With a line it would be as unpredictable. In a matter of a couple seconds she could be 5 ft above the deck of the rescue boat or her hanging 3 ft below the bow with the boat moving downward toward her. Any way they could have rigged it was not fail safe.

Okay, thank you for the info.

I always learn so much on FR.

Here ~ one more thing on those square hearts, they are (as noted) associated with Bradycardia ~ a type of arrhythmia in the upper Atrial chamber.

That, by itself, is frequently associated with an extra sinus ~ or nerve nexus that fires an electrical charge that makes the heart beat.

So, with a square heart, enlarged Atrial chambers, and an extra sinus you can end up with arrhythmia so severe that you are almost an invalid and will usually not get enough sleep time.

Fortunately modern science has given us a solution ~ a simple procedure where they insert a tube up through your groin into your heart. Another tube is inserted into your main artery and down to about the same spot. The physicians then send an electrical charge into the extra sinus and ablate it (which means to coagulate the cells). That ends the problem. They pull out the equipment. Put a bandage on your crotch, and you go home about 2 hours after you arrived, Cured!

One of the symptoms of having this condition involves an inability to get your heart pumping more than about 120 beats per minute except when it's involved in one of it's spells of arrhythmia.

You'll be pumping along doing what you want and your heart is chucking faster and faster and it hits 120, then it starts slowing down ~ usually as low as 40 beats per minute.

Now that's some serious stuff. On the other hand each beat is much more powerful than it normally would since the atrial chambers are actually helping to move blood through the body, and you are sucking in more oxygen since there's more blood being pushed through the lungs faster.

Been thinking about this one for many years. It has something to do with being able to get dunked in cold Arctic waters and survive ~ and to live around glaciers all the time ~ and survive that.

Remember, if you just move more air in and out of your lungs, you may get a bit more oxygen but at the same time you'll dry out your bronchial tubes and mouth. You'll lose a lot of heat too. So, if you can extract just a little bit more oxygen from the blood, and more efficiently move more CO2 into the air in the lungs on each breath, that more powerful heart can be your friend. Instead of moving air past the blood, you move the blood past the air, reduce your breathing rate, retain more body heat, and ski uphill with ease!

Much of a bird's breathing apparatus does exactly this ~ finding something similar in humans shouldn't be a surprise.

I’m sure it will be easy for those who have never rescued a single person in their lives to second guess these rescuers.

May God be with grandma and all involved.

...of moving air past the blood, you move the blood past the air...

***
Amazing.

So this square heart is found more frequently among groups indigenous to regions above the arctic circle?

This is fascinating stuff. Thanks again for the free education. :)