Originally Posted by
Treg
However, we do know that post incident the body was recovered by stretcher to the identified road by ground teams in approximately 1.5hrs (reported in Australian media) without rescuer injury. Also, we do know that there was at least five hours of daylight when the decision to winch was made. Therefore, can I please redirect you to my first question and ask for more
Treg, the fact that it took an hour and a half to get through the bush doesn't take into account the time to get the SES crews into the location and start the evolution, so it may well have been a 5 hour process including the call-out time for the SES volunteers, planning, equipment selection, drive through bush roads to the location, walk up the hill to the casualty, etc. Air Ambulance Victoria are extremely well experienced in this decision making as are the VicPol Air Wing (who also carry out winching within Victoria) and I would expect their decision to have been the right one for the circumstances.
I'm not familiar with the current strops in use but a long time ago we had a simple loop around both ends of the strop at the hook which was then pulled down to the patient's chest and was effectively locked in place by the sideways pull on the strop itself. I can only assume this is no longer possible with the design of modern strops?