[Can they be avoided?] Turkey’s winter tragedies

The winter sports industry has a firm grip on the most inhabited and picturesque mountain areas, and there are top-class ski resorts within a couple of hours of İstanbul as well as opportunities to hike and climb in a winter wonderland all along the Black Sea coast. However, these opportunities also lead to accidents. The news two weeks ago focused on two tragedies: the slow death from hypothermia of student Ümit Özgen in Uludağ and the sudden demise of 11 hikers in an avalanche on Mount Zigana, near Trabzon.

Özgen, 21, was snowboarding with friends on the morning of Jan. 19. As mist came down in the late morning his friend decided to pack up and head for the hotel, but Özgen decided he could still navigate down the run, and they separated. Ümit climbed on his snowboard and set off down the wrong face of the mountain and away from the resort. Three hours after he was last seen he started to send text messages to his friends saying he was lost and asking if they could arrange for a flare to be fired off to help him. The text messages grew increasingly desperate as his friends failed to find a flare. At 5:03 p.m. he sent one message saying "Emergency helicopter, before it gets dark, I'll freeze in an hour." At 5:50 p.m. he sent another: "Please, I'm freezing, helicopter, they said they would, I'm dying." Finally, he sent a last message before his phone's power ran out at 6:20 p.m.: "I've seen a light."

Ümit Özgen, a 21-year-old student, suffered a slow death from hypothermia in Uludağ on Jan. 19.

Özgen was not only poorly dressed for the weather conditions, in just a long-sleeve T-shirt, jacket and snow pants, he was also uninformed about how to cope with being lost in the snow. Having passed a wooden hut, he was advised by search teams to stay there, but he didn't. Rather than conserve his phone's battery, he accepted calls from his friends. The battery died and when his outer jacket froze up, he took it off. Eleven snow mobiles looked for him in thick fog. When the fog lifted, at 9 p.m., they found the wooden hut, but Ümit wasn't there. When the search parties finally found him at 11 p.m. he was still alive, but he died later in the hospital.

Accusations of negligence

Others have raised questions about the quality of medical care given to Özgen after he was found. Republican People's Party (CHP) deputy Sacid Yıldız submitted a parliamentary inquiry to Health Minister Recep Akdağ requesting a formal explanation of why a helicopter wasn't used to get Özgen to the hospital, why there are no proper health facilities at a resort that sees dozens of cases of broken bones every year there and why the existing facilities are understaffed.

Similar accusations surrounded the second tragedy, only a week later on Jan. 26. A party of 17 hikers from the Trabzon Tennis and Mountaineering club were swept away by an avalanche on Mount Zigana. Eleven were crushed to death in the snow. Six survived and three were injured. Video footage from the group's cell phones shows high jinks early in the morning when their group leader, Erhan Terzi, shouts "avalanche" as a joke and everyone starts running in every direction until they hear him laughing. Later footage shows the group walking single file, but not evenly spread out.

Nasuh Mahruki, mountaineer and head of AKUT, put the blame on the hikers and their group leader.

The weather was clear and sunny and, having decided the snow was too soft to ski, they set out to walk instead. The route was well known to them, and by 10:30 a.m. the group had ascended to just over 2,000 meters and was walking along a snowed-over river bed in the Zigana pass when they heard two loud popping sounds. Some said after the incident that they believed a gun had been fired, but this is now thought to have been the sound of the ice breaking away. The descending avalanche carried 12 of the hikers over a kilometer. News footage showed desperate search-and-rescue teams walking in long strips over the blanket of snow pushing long poles into the ground repeatedly in an attempt to find survivors. Those images were followed by pictures of paramedics stumbling down the slope with bodies held despairingly in brown wool blankets. Of the 12 who were swept away, two were dug out alive and only one survived.

Survivor Rahmi Keleş acted instinctively when the snow hit him and even though his right arm was trapped beneath him he used his left hand to clear snow from his face so he could breathe. His shouts for help attracted the attention of survivor Yonca Yılmaz, who came and dug him out of the snow using her bare hands. The first rescuers arrived within 15 minutes of the avalanche, and local residents, gendarmes, civil defense authorities, soldiers and rescue dogs all helped in the search operation.

Are the hikers to blame?

Many have also tried to point fingers over negligence here; not at the authorities or the rescue teams, but at the hikers themselves. Particularly harsh words came from Nasuh Mahruki, head of Turkey's internationally renowned search-and-rescue organization AKUT: "Incidents where 16 or 17 people are swept away in one blow are few and far between. In dangerous areas they should have had a gap of 20 meters between them at the minimum. Their group leader should have done a snow test. This was a hiking group's accident, not a mountaineer's accident. Mountaineers are more careful. When there is a risk of avalanche they cross one by one. They started this avalanche. They should all have been walking in the exact footsteps of the leader so as not to break the spine of the snow; instead they were cutting all over the slope. Too many people in the same place could have started the snow moving. It's safe to say there was negligence here." The only allowance for external factors that Mahruki was prepared to make was to say that he believed global warming was making conditions more dangerous as sudden changes in temperature make avalanches more likely.

Samsun Mountaineering Club head İdris Güney was more charitable in his assessment: "[Hiking group leader] Erhan was sensible, hard working, successful and disciplined. I think our friends thought that because there was little snow, there was also little chance of an avalanche. Normally in dangerous areas we would walk four or five meters apart, but this hike was part of the winter sports festival and the weather was good. I think these things led to a little carelessness, and our friends failed to take the mountain seriously." The Trabzon Tennis and Mountaineering Club made a statement defending the actions of their members and Terzi, in particular, making it clear that he was an accomplished mountain climber and experienced guide. "There is no truth to claims that we cut through a layer of snow. The photographs show everyone walking in single file. As for the avalanche test, you need enough snow to actually carry one out, and everyone knows they are not done routinely."

According to the Directorate for Natural Disasters, the rate of deaths caused by avalanches in Turkey is 23 per year on average, comparing favorably with the US and Canada, where there are 25 deaths a year on average. What the figures don't take into account, however, is the smaller proportion of the Turkish population that participates in winter sports. Since 1890 they estimate that there have been 1,227 avalanches, claiming 1,417 lives, but admit that the data are inadequate, as until the 1990s only avalanches that affected human habitations were recorded, and between 1890 and 1923 they could only find two records. The worst year on record for avalanche-related deaths was 1992, when 157 avalanches claimed 443 lives. However, the highest number of avalanches, 159, was recorded in 2007. Ömer Murat Yavaş, from the directorate, warned that as the number of people engaging in winter sports increases, the danger of avalanches also increases. He stressed the importance of sending one person at a time in avalanche areas.

Playing in the snow may seem like fun, but these weather conditions have earned themselves the nickname "the white death" for good reason. Don't go, or -- if you do -- don't go unprepared. Assume the worst could happen and learn how to survive it.