14 Jul Satellite comms to the rescue
Speedcast provides a variety of mission-critical disaster preparedness and recovery solutions for governments, enterprises, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The company understands that in a crisis, the better prepared the team, the better the chance of success at saving more people and business data than those that are not.
Earlier this year, a fire and rescue organization in New Zealand made use of support from technology and support provided by Speedcast to locate and rescue two ‘trampers’ lost deep in the Kahurangi National Park. The pair entered the bush on May 9 but became lost early on in their tramp due to heavy fog, spending nearly two weeks hunkered down in rugged terrain, desperate for water, and running out of food.
The remote location also caused poor cellular coverage, adding further challenges to the search. Speedcast had recently equipped the organisation with 18 Forward Command Vehicles and nine fixed sites with new land mobile auto-acquire satellite communications systems. These provided an increase in bandwidth to the rescuers which was deployed for email, mapping and management of the search and. made a significant improvement noted by the teams and police staff working from the location.