Grinning - 11 January 2011 07:23 PM
Any news on whether anyone was wearing ABS?
What terrible news. I ordered myself a Snowpulse yesterday having researched this site on related articles. If the Telegraph is accurate it would appear that there is another example of failure to trigger the air bag.
“The four dead skiers - a British man, a French man, a French woman and a third man whose nationality is not yet known, were found buried under several feet of snow.
All were equipped with avalanche transceivers, a type of radio equipment used to track skiers. It emits a pulse signal which can be picked up by a search transceiver.
The first person was dug out after 10 minutes and the last was found 20 minutes after the avalanche struck.
The skiers, aged between 30 and 50, were in an area known as Pont St Charles, a popular off-piste sector at around an altitude of 8,800 feet and were skiing with a professional guide.
A spokesman for the mountain rescue said: “It was a very, very big avalanche. We don’t yet know what set it off. We have launched an investigation. It is possible that the group of seven skiers could have set the avalanche off. If one person had been skiing perhaps there would have not been an avalanche.
“The first rescuer was there within a few minutes. And there were four doctors at the scene. But the four skiers were all pronounced dead on the slope.
“One of them was equipped with an Avalanche Airbag but it had not inflated.
“All of the skiers were wearing avalanche transceivers so they were found fairly quickly.
“Of the seven skiers, two managed to stay on top of the snow and one woman was partly buried, just her legs. But she had no serious injuries. The four people who died were all buried completely.
“We are in the process of trying to contact families.” “