nsaladin wrote:I picture it like this: SAR members have these pagers like in the 1990 Film "Navy Seals" featuring Tom Cruise. They get a page and they all hop in a truck and head to the heli-pad.... High hopes lol.
Volunteer SAR in Colorado: pagers - yes. Everybody heads for the helo - no. Everybody heads for a staging point, then
if there is a helo a select set of people may get to ride it. There are exceptions, but you're not generally going to see volunteer SAR folks hanging on penetrators and doing shorthauls. Usually what happens if you see a helo performing some daring rescue - the volunteer SAR team's incident coordination staff called the necessary people to get the helicopter to respond, and the helicopter showed up with the people who know how to use the helicopter's resources to perform the daring rescue.
Note that I'm speaking in generalizations, not absolutes. There are exceptions to every rule.
Of course, if you're the victim you don't really care who's doing what, just that it's getting done - and that's the important thing.
mkrier wrote:2. Could someone explain to me what is a "mechanical uphaul" technique?
This is just using ropes and pulleys to create a mechanical advantage for lifting weight - 2:1 or 3:1 are common and simple, though higher ratios (more "advantage") can be obtained through rigging more advanced systems. Basically, a mechanical advantage system lets you lift a weight while only needing the effort of lifting a certain percentage of the weight - for example, a 3:1 MA system means it only feels like you're lifting 1/3rd of the weight. The trade off using an MA system is that to lift a weight 1 foot, you have to pull X feet of rope through the system - where X is whatever the mechanical advantage is - 3:1 = 3 feet, 4:1 = 4 feet, etc.
In summary: a MA system lets you use less force to lift a weight, at the cost of having to pull more rope.
I would guess that this particular scenario went something like this: MRA set up an anchor and a mechanical advantage uphaul system connected to it, then a rescuer with a spare harness either rappelled down to her or was lowered to her on the same system, put the harness on her, then both she and the rescuer were pulled up the slope using the uphaul system (perhaps together or perhaps independently).