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Dear Board members:
The Petronas Beer Demo Safety Update posted a few days ago included this passage when reporting on the worsening state of the organizational structure:
“Worst of all, the “promise the moon” selling point made by (Mr. Lee’s employee Mark Hewitt) recalls to mind the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, where several people DIED because a couple of very experienced mountaineers GUARANTEED the summit for several completely unqualified-but-PAYING customers, and then things got totally out of control because the experienced mountaineers were more focused on their guarantee than on safety.
“That’s what’s going on here. Promising 40 jumps from Petronas to people with 3 BASE jumps, giving slots to anyone with the money and time to come on short notice… and that’s only the part of this horror-show-in-the-making that I know about.”
There appeared a few days thereafter the following post, submitted by an individual who identified himself as Dirtbag.
= = = = = = =
“Robin:
Your version of the 96 Everest disaster is as inaccurate as it can be. People died, not because of a "guarantee" to reach the summit, but due to a series of small errors which, when accumulated, resulted in disaster. Errors were made by guides and by clients. To simply blame Rob Hall is a slander and insult to the memory of a person you could not possibly hold a candle to in terms of talent, strength and intelligence. If you think is is tough to get a bunch of seven cell geeks in line to jump off a tower, try coordinating a rescue at 27,000ft. or negotiating with China for access to a new route.
While there is pressure to deliver the summit with any client, no ethical guide, especially Adventure Consultants, will guarantee a summit. Your ass, as well as your ignorance, is showing
As far as your opinion of the event, why not let results speak for themselves? If you were damged, your lawsuit will deal with it.
If things go sideways, it will not be the first time that eager jumpers have blown a site, but your efforts to stir the pot are not helping to increase the odds of ever being invited back to the launch point.
Try leading by example rather than by manifesto.”
= = = = = =
Thank you for proving my point, Mr. Dirtbag. We agree:
Eight people died on Everest in 1996 due to “a series of small errors which, when accumulated, resulted in disaster. Errors were made by guides and clients,” including Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, two of the world’s most experienced, talented and successful extreme altitude climbers and guides.
To make it short and sweet:
Two of the very best in their business,
Independently of each other,
Made a series of mistakes influenced by pressure to deliver summits to their clients that they
Killed themselves and six clients,
Thereby replicating to a “T” the fundamental byword about parachuting fatalities:
“It’s never one thing that kills you. It’s a series of six to eight factors, every time.”
Anyone can make such a fatal ERROR STRING, amateur and professional alike, but there’s a difference:
When an amateur falls prey to an error string, we can generally shrug it off because, after all, that’s what amateurs do.
When masters like Rob Hall and Scott Fischer do it, that’s a wakeup call.
It is precisely because Rob Hall and Scott Fischer were so accomplished that I recalled their disaster as a wakeup call for us BEFORE Petronas goes the same way, because we basically have the same sort of mix of amateurs and experienced jumpers organizaing and participating in the event.
And despite Mr. Dirtbag’s reading, I did not blame Rob Hall for anything. I didn’t even mention his name because I was discussing PROCESS ERRORS, not personal mistakes.
My point was and remains: The process errors being made by the Lee-Hewitt-Helliwell-Weston-Weaselkotter organizing theme --“Come one, come all, we’ll figure out how to get you 40 jumps from Petronas if you just give us $400 -- has set the stage to repeat many of the process errors that culminated in disaster on Mount Everest in 1996 – so we better stop this now, before it gets further out of hand.
Now let’s look at Mr. Dirtbag’s proposition that my “version of the 96 Everest disaster is as inaccurate as it can be.” What follows are some of the details, which I have excerpted below and which appear in a longer article by Mark Bryant on the Outside Magazine Online website: http://www.outsidemag.com/magazine/0...5krakauer.html.
In it you will find not only detail about the Everest disaster itself, but vital glimpses into the mindset and “self-selection” process among climbers of the world’s tallest mountain that echo the mentality of those driven to jump from its tallest building. Just substitute “BASE jumper” for climber in those passages and it becomes very clear why the chances of problems at Petronas grow every day.
Outside magazine, May 1997
Everest a Year Later: False Summit
An interview with John Krakauer, author of INTO THIN AIR: The Story of the 1996 Mount Everest Disaster
By Mark Bryant
For this magazine it began four years ago, when we heard that 40 climbers, several of them clients on commercially guided expeditions, had reached the summit of Mount Everest on a single day. That so many should crowd onto the highest spot on earth was astonishing and troubling. What might this suggest to other weekend climbers about the apparent ease of adding Everest to one's trophy case? What might it augur on a peak already swarming with too many climbers too inexperienced to save themselves — let alone others — if caught by one of the Himalayas' frequent storms? It seemed a foregone conclusion that reality would soon strike home with a vengeance. The only question was when.
By the time we asked contributing editor and lifelong climber Jon Krakauer to examine firsthand the circumstances that might lead to a disaster, things had only gotten worse. Swelling ranks of amateur climbers were paying ever fatter sums to be escorted up the peak, and some outfitters seemed to be all but guaranteeing the summit.
* * * * *
Guide Rob Hall ran an ad boasting of a "100 percent success rate." "Hey, experience is overrated," another guide, Scott Fischer, told Krakauer while we were shopping around for a commercial expedition for him to join. "We've got the big E figured out, we've got it totally wired. These days, I'm telling you, we've built a yellow brick road to the summit."
* * * * *
If only that had been true. Instead, on May 10, 1996, after Krakauer and 23 others reached the top, dozens of climbers became trapped on the descent, pinned down by gale-force winds and triple-digit windchill. Eight lost their lives, including Hall and three others on Krakauer's six-person summit team. Another who died that day: Fischer. By the end of the month, 12 people on the mountain would perish, the highest single-season body count in Everest history.
Krakauer and many of the other survivors were left scarred and shaken. Nevertheless, Krakauer turned around and wrote, with real and awful authority, "Into Thin Air," a hypnotic, heartbreaking account of the tragedy published in Outside's September 1996 issue (and later made into a full-length book by the same title). No other article in the magazine's 20 years has prompted the reaction this piece has; many months later, we're still receiving letters from readers haunted by Krakauer's tale. It's a story that won't go away. Nor, given its chastening ramifications, should it. A fellow writer and friend of the magazine recently remarked that the episode put him in mind of another instance of nature slapping down humankind and our runaway hubris: the sinking of the "unsinkable" Titanic. Then he asked if anyone had learned anything this time around.
MB: Who's going on these guided Everest expeditions — and on some of the non-guided, noncommercial trips as well? And just how much of the necessary skill and experience do these people have? I quote from your book: "When it came time for each of us to assess our own abilities and weigh them against the formidable challenges of the world's highest mountain, it sometimes seemed as though half the population of Base Camp was clinically delusional."
JK: Let's not mince words: Everest doesn't attract a whole lot of well-balanced folks. The self-selection process tends to weed out the cautious and the sensible in favor of those who are single-minded and incredibly driven. Which is a big reason the mountain is so dangerous. The psychological circuitry of most Everest climbers makes it hard as hell for us to quit, even when it's obvious that we should. If you're willful enough to make it all the way to 27,000, 28,000 feet — well, let just say that the less willful and less stubborn already bailed and headed down long ago.
MB: Back to the Everest survivors for a moment: From the time I first read the manuscript of your magazine story, I was struck by the shared culpability that so many must feel, at least to some small degree. Yes, there were some huge mistakes made, some critical ones, but there were also so many little things that built, imperceptibly, chillingly, one upon another.
JK: Believe me, I've been through every permutation: If I'd just done this, if Doug or Beck had done that, if Rob had done this. And I have to admit that not only do I feel guilt, but I've also done a lot of silent finger-pointing and blaming of others — and I'm not talking about the relatively measured criticisms I've voiced in print. I'm talking now about much harsher, darker judgments that I've kept largely to myself. Ultimately, however, I've come to realize that obsessing over the unacknowledged guilt of others does nothing to erase my own culpability. Besides, I suspect I'm not the only one who isn't sleeping particularly well at night.
MB: Rob Hall was an enormously likable, talented person. He also made some tremendous mistakes, which you certainly haven't shied away from investigating. The difficult questions you've raised about Hall's actions, as well as the actions of others, have managed to upset quite a number of people, haven't they? How do you deal with that?
JK: Plenty of people have said to me, "Who are you to assess someone else's role or lack of experience or skill?" But I'm a working journalist, and I was there, and I was there to do a job — to tell what happened as best I could. I certainly feel bad that some people are hurt by my assessments, but somebody needed to step up and tell what went on up there. Jesus, people died — a lot of people died.
I recently got a letter from Alexander Theroux, the writer, contrasting the act of climbing Everest with other climbing. He pointed out — correctly, I believe — that Everest seems to attract a different sort of person, someone not necessarily interested in climbing per se, but simply in climbing the highest mountain in the world. There's something about Everest that causes it to lodge especially hard in the public imagination. In Theroux's opinion, the compulsion to climb it is every bit as powerful and deeply felt as the age-old human compulsion to fly.
I guess maybe we should think of Everest not as a mountain, but as the geologic embodiment of myth. And when you try to climb a chunk of myth — as I discovered to my lasting regret — you shouldn't be too surprised when you wind up with a lot more than you bargained for.
END OF BRYANT ARTICLE
Now, I know maybe Mr. Dirtbag claims that “no ethical guide, especially Adventure Consultants, will guarantee a summit,” but according to OUTSIDE, Mr. Hall’s company is, in fact, on record advertising a "100 percent success rate," and according to Mr. Krakauer, Mr. Fischer told him that “experience is overrated. We've got the big E figured out; we've got it totally wired. These days, I'm telling you, we've built a yellow brick road to the summit (Outside Online, ibid.).”
So while I’m ignorant of many things, and don’t do high-altitude mountains, Mr. Dirtbag is uninformed to say the least when he posits that “guarantee psychosis” did NOT drive the process errors that precipitated the 1996 Everest disaster.
The stage is now set in Malaysia for a similar type of “world’s tallest building” psychosis-driven process errors, brought on because the organizers are promising (is a promise more or less binding than a ‘guarantee’?) 40 jumps each to all competitors (See the post:” The Rumble in the Jungle that is Petronas, “post 20-something, Aguust 9 by SkyVenture employee Mark Hewitt).
Just as importantly, Dann Lee told me a week ago in a phone conversation that he and his sister and Mr. Hewitt had already been working 16-20-hour days.
Well, one of the Everest error strings was made by Scott Fischer when he burned himself out at both ends of the mountain: He made four climbs back and forth to the top camp, plus going to the summit, all trying to overcome PROCESS ERRORS precipitated by :
a) Too many low-timers to babysit; and
b) the encumbering mentality of promises that in May 1996 turned Fischer’s yellow brick road into a blood trail.
That’s what Mr. Lee & Co. are doing now: Working furiously and frantically to make good on big promises with low-timers and the bottom line is:
By the time “Xtreme Skydive 2001” actually commences, its chief organizers will most likely be suffering from “real” sleep deprivation psychosis. And that’s not opinion; that’s fact and physics.
But back to Mr. Dirtbag’s post, wherein he suggested I shut up and “let results speak for themselves.”
Interesting ethical proposition:
Wait and watch the disaster happen instead of trying to prevent it by warning people ahead of time when you KNOW something is wrong.
I guess maybe that’s where Mr. Dirtbag gets his self-professed nickname: He thinks I should wait for someone to clip into a pin I KNOW is bad – and let the results speak for themselves – rather than give an “opinion” of the situation to the clueless climber.
Or in more germane terms, he wouldn’t want me to give an “opinion” to anyone about their misrouted pilot chute before they exit: He wants me to wait and watch and… let the results speak for themselves.
Petronas is a misrouted pilot chute and a disconnected bridle cord with one brake stowed high, one brake stowed low, one high, and the risers crossed. It’s ten bad pins in a row above a bad belay point over a rock ledge on an old rope. For a dozen different reasons on several different levels, it’s really a bad idea for the worldwide BASE community to just stand by and let “ things go sideways.”
Yes, “it will not be the first time that eager jumpers have blown a site,” and not even the first time irresponsible, immature, unprepared jumpers have blown a LEGAL site, but this current effort, whether we get blood on the building or not, is a screwup of enormous proportions, and ABSOLUTELY I would trade future access to Petronas if I can prevent Petronas Corporation, Malaysia and my sport from being embarrassed and criticized for allowing something so obviously haphazard and poorly planned to continue.
Finally, as far as leadership goes, whether by manifesto or example, I’d rather lead than cover my backside by sitting on it while something bad happens to a sport I love -- and a country and corporation I’ve come to respect and admire.
