‘Buried in pitch black under 6ft of snow, I began to panic’
Engineer Danielle George gives ‘Horizon’ viewers a taste of what it’s like to be the victim of an avalanche
It was my own mind that let me down. Buried in the pitch black, beneath 6ft of snow, I had only a thin tube from which to breathe. I couldn’t move, see or hear a thing. I’d never thought of myself as particularly fearful, and I was told that I might be able to lie there for an hour. But after just six minutes, the panic set in: I had to get out.
I was taking part in an experiment for BBC Two’s Horizon, but while there was no real risk of me dying, that didn’t make it any less terrifying. As an engineering professor, I was in a team of scientists hoping to revolutionise our understanding of avalanches, which kill hundreds every year. Even in the UK, around 30 people have died in avalanches since 2000, most memorably in 2013, when four climbers were killed in Glencoe, Scotland.
As climate change takes its toll, it’s becoming ever harder to predict avalanches. With this in mind, we teamed up with BBC producers to fly out to the Canadian Rockies. We rigged a mountain with cameras and loaded a helicopter with explosives, triggering our own artificial avalanche. If we just knew a little more about them, we thought, we might have a better chance of preventing tragedies such as Glencoe.
Going into the study, I didn’t actually know that I’d end up buried under an artificial avalanche, and I can’t say I was delighted. But I could see the experiment’s value: experts are keen to test the Avalung, a potential game-changer in the effort to reduce avalanche deaths. A filtration device with a breathing tube, used by hikers and skiers, it sucks oxygen from the snowpack while pushing expelled carbon monoxide away, and could help you survive for up to an hour.
I lay down in a snowy pit with only
my feet visible (wilderness medicine expert Dr Nic Kanaan told me to wiggle my feet if I needed to escape). He fitted me up with heart-rate and blood sensors to monitor my body’s reaction, and proceeded to dump half a ton of snow on top of me. It became darker and darker as each mound of snow was shovelled on to my body, until I was left in total darkness. The sound became more and more distant, until I could hear nothing at all. We rarely experience true silence and it’s certainly unnerving to be left completely alone with your thoughts.
My nostrils were filled with snow, and I could take only shallow breaths through the thin Avalung tube fitted into my mouth. A few minutes in, it became physically impossible to take a deep breath. Then I began to panic.
After less than six minutes, I wiggled my feet and was swiftly rescued – I can’t say I’m particularly proud. I was surprised by how poorly my brain coped with the pressure. I knew that, logically, there was zero chance I would die, but anxiety had taken hold.
It’s certainly possible to survive an avalanche with an Avalung, and many have done. But perhaps the strangest part of the whole experiment was how I felt afterwards. Nic was certainly correct when he warned me that, for the first few nights at least, I might imagine I was back under the snow when I closed my eyes to sleep. My three-year-old daughter likes roughand-tumble play, often covering my face with a hand or a cushion. Now, it prompts a little flashback each time.
The experiment was more than just a piece of dramatic television, of course. Every year, avalanches seem to become more unwieldy. We visited Missoula, Montana, in the Rockies for the documentary. In 2014, for the first time in living memory, they were struck by an unexpected avalanche. Casey Greene remembers hearing a deafening roar down his street while his children were out playing; his daughter, Coral, clambered out of the snow unharmed, but his eight-year-old son, Phoenix, was nowhere to be seen.
“I know people don’t live that long underneath snow,” he told us. Yet after a gruelling 45 minutes, Phoenix was pulled out alive: he had fallen into a pocket of air formed by a window frame, which saved him. Casey’s neighbour, Michel Colville, was not so lucky. She was rescued, but died from her injuries two days later.
If we want to avoid tragedies like these, we’ll need to continue conducting research, and enlisting brave people to test experimental equipment like the Avalung.