Search and rescue crews wasting thousands of dollars chasing obsolete, and thoughtlessly discarded, beacons. Joseph Barrett reports.
Search and rescue teams are wasting tens of thousands of dollars hunting for carelessly discarded distress beacons.
Auckland's Westpac Rescue Helicopter has been scrambled for false alarms twice this month. The first saw it trace an emergency signal to a beacon in a suburban Auckland industrial site.
The second was spent flying for about an hour above the city before the signal went dead.
The callouts cost the rescue helicopter trust almost $10,000 in running costs and wasted staff time, and they followed a string of expensive false alarms last year.
Westpac helicopter crew chief Herby Barnes said the organisation treated all callouts as serious and always dispatches three or four rescuers.
"In most cases it might be a waste of resources but we have to treat them all as emergencies."
Beacons are used by boaties, trampers and other people enjoying the great outdoors.
The problems are caused by beacons that became obsolete after a change in the frequency used for emergency signals a year ago.
Since February 1 last year, beacons must transmit on 406Mhz, a frequency that allows rescuers to better pinpoint their location.
But the old frequency is still used for emergency communication by pilots and the latest callouts came after passing aircraft picked up the distress signals.
Another Westpac helicopter crew member, who asked not to be named, said some people may not know the old beacons are out of date and could be using them in a real emergency:
"So we have to take them seriously and treat it like a genuine activation."
One weekend last year, emergency services tracked two to rubbish dumps in Queenstown and Wellington.
The operations took more then 30 hours of co-ordination and search time and wasted thousands of dollars.
Ross Henderson, from Rescue Coordination Centre New Zealand, urged people to deactivate beacons before throwing them out.
He said the battery should be removed and to do that people could talk to a retailer, the Coastguard or rescue coordination centre on 0800-406-111.
