Vehicle’s UHF leads mountain hunt Driver calls in rescuers

A FAINT distress call picked up on a truck driver’s UHF radio on Saturday sparked a six- hour rescue operation on Mt Stuart.

A 36- year- old Gulliver man’s Toyota LandCruiser had tumbled 150m down a cliff face from a road on the mountain and was badly injured.

A Queensland Fire and Emergency spokeswoman said a member of the public heard the victim on the radio channel.

“He didn’t know where the man was as he was moving in a vehicle away from the location,” she said.

“It was all sketchy, the information. We got it secondhand and we had a rough idea where it was, but we were told the vehicle wouldn’t be visible from the road.”

The search began about 4.50pm with emergency services lacking a name of the patient or a road name.

Four- wheel- drive vehicles were sent down tracks to search for the man, who was not responding to messages on the radio.

A helicopter was flown from Mackay to assist with the search.

RACQ CQ Rescue used night- vision goggles to find the site of the accident and locate the injured driver.

“The Mackay rescue helicopter, with a pilot, air crewmen, rescue crewmen and critical care paramedic on board, departed the Mackay base and upon arrival at Mt Stuart about 9.30pm, immediately began a search of the area by following the road up to the lookout,” RACQ CQ Rescue air crewman Quinton Rethus said.

“We started the search at the bottom of Mt Stuart and worked our way up, looking for anything reflective, but this was really difficult given it was so dark and such thick veg- etation,” he said. “It was pitch black and we couldn’t see anything using the high- intensity helicopter spotlight, but about 40 minutes into the search and half way up we saw what appeared to be two headlights among the trees through the night- vision goggles,” Mr Rethus said.

About 9.50pm the man was found stuck in a vehicle, conscious and breathing.

He had pelvic injuries, which prevented him from moving.

“We then focused the beam of the spotlight and talked to police on the mobile phone to direct them to the point where the vehicle appeared to have left the road, and then down the steep embankment to the wreckage of the car,” Mr Rethus said.

The rescue mission ended about midnight.

The man was in Townsville Hospital in a stable condition yesterday. A Queensland Ambulance Service spokeswoman described the search operation as a “big scary puzzle”.