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We were deep inside a cave on a rescue exercise, carrying over 100kg of gear, when I thought:

‘There must be a better way.’

Grant Prattley, April 2022

We’d rigged a tracking line with a 70m offset, hauled a patient and gear up a 110m pitch, and been on the go for 24 hours. When I did the maths, we’d hauled over 1000m that day. Then we still had to carry the gear, over 100kg of it, back out to the entrance.

Question: What can 1000m of hauling in 24hrs and carrying over 100kgs rescue gear do?

Answer: It nearly broke me. It also got me asking a question I haven’t stopped asking since: what do we actually need to do this job, and are we making it harder than it has to be?

The latest rope rescue gear and techniques won’t answer that. You have to stop, work out what’s actually required, then act.

I’m Grant Prattley, founder of Over The Edge Rescue. We help rescue organisations in New Zealand, Australia and worldwide improve how they operate, by finding out what you need first, then building the solution with you.

Take the New Zealand Speleological Society. We worked with their cave rescuers to redesign how they operate, starting with the problem, not the gear. That meant getting first-hand experience of what rescuers actually face underground.

We found:

  • Rescues happen deep in caves, hours from the entrance
  • Every hour travelled in means 12-24 hours to get someone out
  • Teams are small, usually 3-4 people
  • Rescuers rarely train together, once or twice a year at most
  • Gear has to be light and compact enough for narrow passages; cave packs top out around 35 litres
  • The rescue load is usually 100kg, with the attendant ascending beside the stretcher
  • It’s all manual labour, and fatigue builds fast, both physical and mental
  • Rescuers need to be self-sufficient for the first 24 hours: food, sleep, water
  • They need a working understanding of underground comms and incident management, not just rope skills

From there, we ran workshops to test a simpler system built around lighter ropes and equipment, including the gear cavers already carry. Only once that held up did we build rescue courses around it. Then we tested the whole thing in a 36-hour deep-cave search-and-rescue exercise.

That’s the approach behind everything we do here: work out what the problem actually is before you reach for a solution.

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