The national Mountain Rescue Association spring conference, in its 61st year, is making its first appearance in Pennsylvania this weekend — only its third venture east of the Mississippi River.
Seven Springs Mountain Resort in Somerset County welcomed about 200 guests from across the country and world for the three-day event, which featured helicopter demonstrations, ski-lift rescues, canine search sessions, educational speakers and the Search and Rescue Games, a series of field activities.
The all-volunteer Allegheny Mountain Rescue Group, or AMRG, hosted the event alongside the MRA. The Pittsburgh-based group is the only accredited search and rescue team in Pennsylvania.
(CNN)When police in Austin, Texas, responded to calls about a boat at the edge of Longhorn Dam earlier this week, they found it teetering over the edge — with four people aboard.
The group was rescued Thursday with the help of the Austin Police Department’s lake patrol unit and other first responders. But the situation could have been a lot worse if the officers hadn’t shown up so quickly, authorities said.
“This would have been very tragic had they gone over the dam,” Austin Police Department Assistant Chief Scott Perry said in a Friday news conference. “It’s a very high dam and there would have been probably severe injuries if not loss of life due to that.”
The group, which was visiting from out of town, was touring Lady Bird Lake on an electric boat Thursday afternoon and got close to the dam’s spillway, Perry said.
They were distracted and didn’t notice the boat had passed two marked buoys notifying them to turn around, officer Bradley Smith, with the police department’s lake patrol unit, said during the news conference. Smith was one of three Austin lake patrol officers who were part of the rescue.”
By the time they realized they were almost at the dam, they tried to turn around to avoid it but the suction was too powerful and pulled them against the dam,” Smith said.
MEXICO CITY — A man in northern Mexico had to be rescued after he accidentally trapped himself in a hole that he dug so he could spy on his former girlfriend in violation of a court order to stay away from her, authorities said Sunday.
The Sonora state attorney general’s office said the 50-year-old man had spent days digging the hole in Puerto Penasco, a town on the Gulf of California, only to become trapped and require assistance to get out.
The man had been ordered to stay away from his former girlfriend due to domestic violence charges and he is now in jail, authorities said.
Rescuers are searching for five men who have been trapped inside a Virginia cave since Saturday night.
Rescuers searching for five men who have been trapped inside a Virginia cave since Saturday night are settling in for what could be a long operation to bring them out safely.
“With cave rescue incidents, this has the chance to extend to eight to 12 hours,” Virginia Department Search and Rescue Coordinator Billy Grimes told WJHL.
The trapped men, ranging in age from 35 to 59, are believed to be uninjured inside Cyclops Cave, according to Russell County Emergency Management.
Although the cave in southwestern Virginia has more than seven miles of passages in it, some of which are quite narrow, authorities believe the men are not in the cave’s farthest reaches.
The national Mountain Rescue Association spring conference, in its 61st year, is making its first appearance in Pennsylvania this weekend — only its third venture east of the Mississippi River.
