Everglades Exploration Network

Interesting developments

I was at a meeting of the South Florida National Parks Trust this morning and two very interesting items came up...

#1, it seems our very own Terry Helmers is a quiet life saver. It was reported to me that while he was doing volunteer work offshore @ Biscyane National Park he rescued a swimmer 2 miles off Fowey Light. The swimmer was an involuntary swimmer, he fell overboard engaging in the statistically most dangerous thing you can do on a boat...pissing over the side. It seems Mr. Helmers rescued him when others failed to see him, so kudos to Terry, thank God the bugs were bad so he was on the ouitside instead of the backcountry!

#2, Speaking of coming back from the dead... We may have housing in Flamingo in the (relatively) near future.

We walked the prototype that has been prepared by the Design/Build Class at UM. I had heard that they designed some eco-tents for evaluation purposes. I was not ready for the drawings that they had at our meeting, and I was BLOWN AWAY when we went outside to check out the real deal. These are not tents, they are soft sided houses...and they are wide open and ROOMY and cool, even in July. The vision is that the bases are permanent and the structure and sides come up for the season and come down & into storage for the off/hurricane season.

I have attached pix, which look relly cool , but reall don't do them justice...

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Permalink Reply by Kim Gass on July 6, 2012 at 9:23pm

We have good people on the site. Thank you  Terry! I am sure that you think you did nothing special but I have gotten the feeling from this board that we look after one another. You put that principle into practice.

On an off note I am looking to the day when USCG categorizes  man overboard losses into a meaningful database. IE taking a leak with and without PFD.

When do you think that these shelters may be in Flamingo?.. Perhaps a better question would be ..how many hoops need to be jumped through? Those are awesome.

Permalink Reply by yakmaster on July 6, 2012 at 9:59pm
according to uscg statistics, the number 1 cause of boating deaths is falling overboard while pissing & the folks on the boat don't realize until they realize you didn't bring their beer...
Permalink Reply by Kim Gass on July 6, 2012 at 10:04pm

You  know I would love to quote that. But I need a link. My gut entirely says you are right.  Except for the beer. You are excused on that as clearly it is too hot down there!  

Sent from fleece country. Usually. Though its 78 now and wicked humid and I am hallucinating.  

Permalink Reply by Amazon Bill on July 6, 2012 at 10:16pm

Neat idea. Wonder what they will cost to rent? Can we get maid service? :) Someday they will be on East Cape for $400 a night! Thanks for the update. Terry is amazing, always on adventures, always helping others. That's the true spirit of an outdoorsman.

Permalink Reply by yakmaster on July 6, 2012 at 11:23pm

I'm Cuban, so I may be exagerating on the #1 position...but...

a google search of "overboard urinating small vessel" turns up many hits, including:

 

It aint the USCG, but According to army corps #1 on slide 12:

www.crdamc.amedd.army.mil/safety/summerSafetydl/Boating.ppt

 

 

In Australia (this isn;t just a US problem...) page 7 of :  http://www.commerce.wa.gov.au/worksafe/PDF/Codes_of_Practice/man_ov...

 

Small boat safety and survival  http://nsgl.gso.uri.edu/aku/akue02004.pdf says:

Man Overboard

A. Prevention

1. Avoid drinking alcohol onboard—it leads to loss of coordination and

balance

2. Keep center of gravity low

a. Especially when urinating! Men fall overboard and drown every

year when engaged in this activity

 

#1 on page 3 of causes of overboard on http://www.swf-wc.usace.army.mil/belton/images/Water%20Safety%20Tra...

Ohio River Safety says...http://theohioriver.com/2011/02/safety-on-the-ohio-river/:

 

Urinating: (Don’t laugh) Keep your life jacket on or put it on. If you are standing on the edge of the boat and slip you may fall overboard. In many cases this will cause head injury which can result in sudden drowning syndrome. Go to the dock or use a can.

 

42 cases out of 1803 drownings (with 1252 unknown... so 42 of 550 with known causes...hell, that's near 10%!) in Canada in 10 years & everybody knows them Canadians don't piss nearly as much as Americans!: http://www.redcross.ca/cmslib/general/10drwn_english.pdf

 

 

Hell, they've outlawed the practice in Washignton!:http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/wee-ban-to-stop-big-boating-probl...

Permalink Reply by Kim Gass on July 7, 2012 at 12:27am

Drowning obeys no political boundaries.  Thanks so much for the links!

Permalink Reply by Ted on July 8, 2012 at 4:30pm
Permalink Reply by vivian on July 8, 2012 at 9:26pm
Ted, I wonder what the design criteria was for the prototype? Was this a design competition between UM,FIU, etc?
Permalink Reply by yakmaster on July 8, 2012 at 10:33pm

Park needed it to be moveable to get out of the way for Hurricane Season. UM needed it to be transportable by normal pickups because they build it on campus and then have to take it on site., so the floor splits into 3 strips. All that said, as you can see, they're pretty roomy!

 

This is a class made up of UM grad & undergrad students that gets  a problem & a blank piece of paper...& has to take it from concept to design to construction & completion in one sememster. Pretty tight timeline. The dynamics were interesting, they break up into teams & work on concepts & then they rotate the team members so that no concept has an "owner"...after a few rotations, they get one concept that gets tuned, detailed & built.

 

Every semester, they pick a problem & start all over again, new kids, new problem, new semester.

 

When Flamingo got flattened, the South Florida National Parks Trust put up some money to find a way to bring it back. That fund helped to get the $$$ to get this prototype up & running.

 

Should be in the park soon, so we can oggle it over the season. Still not exactly sure what they're going to do with this one. Hopefully, the new concessionaire will use this or something like it to make Flamingo a  destination again. The proposal from the team was to put 40 of these in the current walk up camping sites, not a bad view when you wake up...

Permalink Reply by Ted on July 8, 2012 at 10:47pm

I’m not sure if there was any competition between schools or the private sector.  Eco Tents where first put forth in the August 2010 Flamingo Master Plan (see Power Point Link below).   Since there has been  budget cuts the ENP is going for low hanging fruit sort of speak, as Eco Tents are a lot cheaper to build than Cottages and Lodge.

http://www.nps.gov/ever/parkmgmt/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfi...

Link below is to the UM course description (first two pages).  

http://arc.miami.edu/images/uploads/Spring2012-UpperLevel.pdf

 

Quite Water Park near me has a rent a tent camping sites for $35.00 per site per night plus a $35.00 cleanup and security deposit fee per site.

http://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/34159547.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

Permalink Reply by Terry on July 9, 2012 at 8:40am

I've rescued divers on 3 different occasions but they were always a case of the

current just pushing them far away from their boat so it was just a matter of

bringing them back to their boat.  This was the damnest thing to see a

head with waving arms out in the clear blue without a boat in sight.

There were 4 of us on a NPS boat and picking up a person treading

water for over an hour with only his swim trunks

gave us all some deep thoughts about wearing PFD's.

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