Tue, Jan 15, 2019 page4

• Mountaineers install 29 life-saving devices

  • Staff writer, with CNA
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  A group of volunteers has spent the past three-and-a-half years equipping 29 huts on the nation’s mountains with portable altitude chambers (PACs), a life-saving device for mountaineers suffering from altitude sickness.

  More than 50 volunteers who are passionate mountain climbers joined the program initiated by Wang Shih-hao (王士豪) and the Taiwan Wilderness Medical Association in 2015 to install PACs on mountains with an elevation of 2,500m above sea level or higher.

  Carrying the 8kg device on their backs, the volunteers have over the past three-and-a-half years installed 29 PACs in remote mountain huts, association deputy president Wang said.

  

  Volunteers carrying life-saving portable altitude chambers stop to pose for a selfie on one of the nation’s mountain ranges in an undated photograph.

  Photo: CNA, courtesy of Wang Shih-hao

  “Each route is long and rugged,” he said, adding that volunteers took turns to carry the 2.2m cylinder to each rest shed.

  One of the most challenging PAC delivery missions was to climb the 85km Southern Section 2 Trail in the Central Mountain Range, he said.

  “Volunteers completed the task after walking in the rain for seven days,” Wang said.

  In October last year, Wang took an air rescue helicopter to the most remote hut on the Mabolasih hiking trail, one of the most challenging hiking paths in the Central Mountain Range.

  That mission completed the program, he said.

  The PACs have saved at least seven lives in the high mountains, Wang said.

  Wang is delighted with the results, he said, anticipating that many people would benefit from the PAC installation program, despite few initially expecting it to be a success.

  Raising funds was a painstaking process, he said, and the group of “silly people” only succeeded because of their persistence.

  Wang organized the program after his father told him that he should do something good for society when he was rescued by the air force on Qi Lai Mountain (奇萊山) in Hualien County in 1999 when he was a university student.

  Qi Lai’s main peak is 3,560m above sea level.

  In 2006, Wang began to research Alpine medicine and after a year of field survey, he found that the frequency of mountaineers suffering altitude sickness in Taiwan was 36 percent.

  In serious cases, mountaineers could die if they develop a high altitude cerebral or pulmonary edema and they are not able to retreat to a lower altitude, Wang said.

  Now an experienced mountaineer and doctor, Wang sad that most deaths from altitude sickness occur because rescue personnel are unable to reach sick climbers because of bad weather or the rugged terrain.

  For passionate mountaineers such as Wang, the PAC program represents their determination to “allow more people to climb mountains happily and return safely.”

  “Altitude sickness can be cured, as long as a low-altitude environment can be brought to the patient as quickly as possible,” Wang said.

  With a PAC, which does not need electricity to function, symptoms of altitude sickness, including headache, dizziness, nausea, vomiting and fatigue, can be relieved within 10 minutes, he said.

  That gives rescue personnel the opportunity to take patients down the mountain for further medical treatment, he said.
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