Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

Same time as I was doing similar work in the same area, same time the Pintupi Nine popped up wondering who all these pale people are.

> likely has

Yeah, mostly the case but certainly not all .. had they been available at the time it'd be unlikely that pair would have been given an EPIRB given the run down economic state of the pastoral station then.

If you want an EPIRB success story for those that are routinely well prepared, there's this tale from the Gunbarrel network:

Desert Raid 2017 - Two Days From Death https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL44EAyz8Qc

Even today people disappear every year or so on these roads .. some are found, others aren't.

If your employer doesn’t supply one for that sort of work, they need to be reported to the OH&S authorities. That said, you can always bring your own. If it were my kid in that scenario I’d buy one for them.

Another factor: currently satellite-based SMS is becoming increasingly available - I just got a message from Telstra the other day telling me it had been enabled on my service (using Starlink direct-to-cell). In years to come it is going to become ever more mainstream. So even if you don’t have an emergency beacon, so long as you have a sufficiently recent mobile phone…

.. then you're golden and just waiting for some one to pop on out the David Carnegie Road, or out into the Tanami.

Communication is only part of the issue here.

In the above linked recent incident the police when contacted couldn't make it out from Kalgoorlie (despite an initial indication) and handed off to a station owner who was able to make a 600 km+ round trip across a broken road to resupply water.

That was lucky, and luck doesn't always land.

In a truly life-threatening situation, the emergency authorities can send help by air

If they don’t and someone dies as a result, they are going to have an awful lot of explaining to do at the coronial inquiry, it isn’t going to end well for them

Of course I realise in this 1986 tragedy the coronial findings (whatever they were) seem to have made very little impact - but again, I think standards and expectations today are different from what they were almost 40 years ago

Dangers now are much as they were then.

That's just my opinion, of course, from working in such environs.

Ideally (hear me out) SMS messaging via Starlink won't operate in large swathes of the Murchison in any case, assuming Musk and other operators carry through on vague promises to turn ground|orbit comms off over Radio Quiet Zones for Radio and Microwave astronomy.

Further, I'm not sure you're grasping the practicalities of sending search and rescue teams to remote locations even when messages get through. Naturally emergency authorities want the best outcomes and make the best efforts they can.

In reality resources have to be available and not directed elsewhere at the time, sufficient to the task (eg: able to land or drop aid that can be used at the correct location ) and numerous other problems that crop up in every post mortem of such incidents from well before the 1980s all the way through until today as people still die in the outback despite your thoughts about standards and expectations.

Forty years ago we prepped to go deep into areas and to have backup on standby (of our own and not "the authorities"). Today it's the same.

It would be interesting to study coronial findings/records - I don’t have the time (or even expertise) to do so properly - to understand to what extent recent fatal incidents have been due to being so unprepared (or unlucky) that they lacked the means to contact the authorities for help versus the authorities were unable to promptly send any due to resource limits (or bureaucratic ineptitude). I suspect the former is (especially nowadays) much more common than the latter, but of course I could be wrong-such a study could turn this discussion from a difference of opinion/perspective into something much more objective.