‘Body recovery will stick with rescuers forever’
A former Taranaki police officer and alpine rescuer says the memory of recovering the bodies of the two men who died on Taranaki Maunga on Tuesday will stick with those involved forever.
The bodies of Christchurch men Richard Phillips and Peter Kirkwood were recovered shortly after 8am yesterday with the assistance of the Taranaki Rescue Helicopter and Police Search and Rescue and Alpine Cliff Rescue team.
‘‘All the rescues stay inside you. You remember them all,’’ George White said.
White, who is now head guide at Top Guides, was a police officer for 34 years and in the force’s search and rescue team as an alpine specialist from 1987 to 2009.
He has completed rescues ‘‘hundreds of bloody times’’ on the maunga and knew just what the team of six would be thinking from the time they were first alerted at 10pm on Tuesday, during Wednesday’s attempt at recovery, and yesterday’s successful recovery.
‘‘Last night the rescuers would have been going through the whole thing in their head,’’ he said.
‘‘‘What could I have done better? How will I get these people down? How am I going to do it tomorrow? Is it going to be safe?’, are all thoughts that would have been racing through their mind.’’
For White, those thoughts were constant while undertaking a rescue, especially when he was unable to recover a body off the ‘‘unforgiving’’ maunga.
‘‘Those thoughts, those images still come back to me,’’ he said, admitting it wasn’t something the rescuers talked about at the time. Last night I could still just see the terrain, the ice, the mist coming in and the deceased lying there.’’ White said the bodies of the men were in a place nowhere near a path, as they had fallen down to it, and not being able to retrieve them on Tuesday night and Wednesday would have been emotionally challenging for the rescuers. ‘‘The place they are, you don’t want to go there.’’ He expected there to have been a lot of rockfall, icy conditions and below freezing temperatures, which would have made it challenging for rescuers. But it was important not to risk the lives of rescuers by pushing for a recovery in poor conditions.
For White, returning a body to the family was the most rewarding part of the job.
Police incident controller, Ben Thompson said the six rescuers involved were ‘‘tired but in good spirits,’’ after the operation. He said a debrief had been held at the rescue helicopter’s hangar at the operation’s conclusion.
The weather conditions on Taranaki Maunga had been ideal for the rescue, he said.
‘‘It was good for a rescue, it was appropriate conditions both on the ground and in the air,’’ he said.