Eight Federated Mountain Club volunteers helped recover bodies after an Air New Zealand DC10 crashed on Mt Erebus, Antarctica, in November 1979. Their skills in mountain rescue were needed because of the site’s icy conditions and crevasses. Hugh Logan, one of the team, recalls the operation.
Transcript
I think the second impression, the one that I'll always carry with me, was the amount of devastation, that was such a large amount of wreckage spread over 600 yards hundred yards right up the slope.
Interviewer: There were just three of you in that first party as I understand that landed there - the site must've seemed almost too big for you for the three of you to be able to check it right through.
Those thoughts hadn't really occurred to us I suppose. When you're involved in search and rescue and sometimes in disaster recovery, when you've had a bit of backgrounding in it, fortunately you tend to get a degree of discipline which makes you focus on the job in hand rather than become too overwhelmed or to reflective about the enormity of situations in front of you. And I think that we were fortunately able to sort of shut our minds off and say, look, we have a job to do, we have to do what we can do at the moment.
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
Antarctica New Zealand, Pictorial Collection
Sound file from Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision. Any re-use of this audio is a breach of copyright. Erebus disaster remembered/Reference number C891128A.
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