Single Wire System

B.C.Cave Rescue started with a set of Radio Shack C.B. radios, they were used in practice situations in relatively small caves and worked reasonably well for short distances. In 1991 we had an incident at Arctomys Cave, located near Mount Robson in the Canadian Rockies. This is the deepest cave north of Mexico at -536m and 3495m in length, the accident occurred at - 475 m, or approximately 50m from the bottom of the system.

As the Communications Coordinator I was assigned a team to run the "communication wire" through the cave. This went fairly smooth, but soon found that communication was almost futile after the fourth spool ( 1200 metres of blasting wire ). By the second day, it was determined that we needed a better form of communication, the wire was removed before the system could be put to use. The second drawback to a "wired system", once the fast moving stretcher team passes the radio point, the communications team becomes useless and spends their time removing wire instead of sending status reports to the surface.