A Day to Die For: 1996: Everest's Worst Disaster - One Survivor's Personal Journey to Uncover the Truth (47 page)

On 8 May, the Imax team decided to descend from Camp 3 and wait for better weather, thereby foregoing their planned summit attempt the following day. On their way down they passed Rob and Scott, who were heading up to Camp 3. David comments:

Surely it is essential, in order for his readers to understand the importance of this event, that they are made aware these were three of the teams sharing information from the same two accurate weather forecasts?

Like Rob and Scott, the Imax team were also taking a risk, although it can reasonably be argued that such judgements are in the nature of high-altitude climbing. The forecasts had shown the weather would hold until 8 May, but from then onwards the wind speed would increase. The Imax team were planning to summit on 9 May. I can only presume they hoped the forecasts might be wrong in either the conditions they had predicted or the timing of the poor weather front that was heading towards Everest. If this indeed turned out to be the case, it would give them the opportunity to summit in an early weather window and to shoot their film with no one else on the upper reaches of the mountain. However, the conditions they observed on the morning of 8 May told them the forecasts were right. Unlike Rob and Scott, the Imax team needed near-perfect conditions to be able to film with the huge IMAX camera and associated equipment, so they headed back down, passing these other two teams who were moving up.

Rob and Scott, especially with their guides and strong Sherpa support, knew they did not need the same conditions; they must have thought that, provided a close eye was kept on the weather, their vast experience would see them summit safely on 10 May, their chosen day.

That said, it is surprising these two did not heed the implied warning when they saw the Imax team retreating. Along with the deteriorating conditions, it should have told them the forecasts appeared to be correct. All the signs were there to warn them that they were taking their high-paying clients into potentially lethal conditions.

Even the following day on the South Col when Anatoli spoke to both Rob and Scott, voicing his grave concerns with regard to the unsettled conditions, there was still the opportunity to abandon their planned summit bid and descend to wait for better weather.

On the morning of 10 May, David observed the conditions from Camp 2: ‘This morning was beautiful, however, not a cloud in the sky. High overhead, the summit pyramid was crystalline and still, without a hint of a plume.’

David at this time was deep in a glacial valley, the Western Cwm, over a mile and a half vertically below the summit. I do not doubt what he and others thought they saw on the morning of 10 May. However, a cloudless sky doesn’t mean there isn’t any wind. I’ve seen Everest in previous years on such wonderfully clear days where climbers high up had to crouch down in fear of being blown off the mountain. From his location, David would not have been able to see the changes on the horizon, or the fast-moving incoming weather, until it got close. Around the same time, we were holding station at Camp 3, trying to decide if it was wise to head up to the South Col given the effects of the strong wind we could see high on the South East Ridge.

At the South Summit, around 10 a.m., Michael Groom had told Rob he thought their team should abandon the attempt and head down. The winds, in Michael’s words, had picked up dramatically.

On the Tibetan side of the mountain, Alan Hinkes and Martin Barnicott were advising their team to stay put at Advanced Base Camp because of the changes they were observing in the upper atmosphere.

The most graphic image of the weather on 10 May that I have seen is in a photograph taken of Neil Laughton at the top of the Geneva Spur, while we were en route to the South Col. In the frame behind Neil is Everest’s South East Ridge with the wind tearing snow off its entire length. I can think of no other image that justifies so well our repeated questioning over the previous 24 hours of why we were moving up for a summit attempt.

David goes on to say:

Yes, the mistakes of 10 May could have undoubtedly been avoided. Maybe it was Rob’s overconfidence, not only in himself but also in his personal interpretation of the information contained within the weather forecasts that doomed him and his party and likewise Scott Fischer.

So why doesn’t David spell this out? David continues:

The ugly premonition: the forecasts had said the full force of the storm was expected to hit on 11 May, less than 12 hours after their summit bid. Surely this was the perfect opportunity for David to explain this to his readers so they could begin to understand what had caused the tragedy?

David, while describing a period after the disaster, which from his book would appear to be between 13 and 15 May, wrote:

Although David does not give the actual date he first contacted the London-based weather service, this left me under the impression that he only thought of obtaining an accurate weather forecast as a result of 10 May. This is a conclusion I believe all of his readers will come to.

I asked Henrik Hansen the following question:
‘Did the Imax team continue to use the same source for their weather forecasts after 10 May as they had been using before that date?’

His reply: ‘Yes they did.’

David’s statement also left with me the misconception that because they were in a remote part of the Himalaya, that somehow weather forecasts and data are problematic.

I quote from Søren Olufsen, Deputy Director of Forecasting Services DMI:
‘Normally the quality of forecasts for the Himalayan area should be expected to be quite high due to the fact that it is downstream from the data-rich European area.’

The question has to be asked: why would Liesl Clark have telephoned from the US to Martin Harris in England and David have approached a London-based weather service if the Imax team was already receiving forecasts from the UK Met Office? David had also contacted Roger Bilham in the US to try to obtain information.

Then I thought back to one of Roger’s replies to me, where he wrote:
‘My understanding of the phone calls I got from David when I returned [to the US] was that the intensity of the storm was a huge surprise.’

Then the penny dropped. Intensity can mean either the actual strength of the storm or how long it lasts. When Mike Harrison and his colleague had re-read the information from the archives, the predictions had been for a steady increase in the winds from the 8th onwards, hitting with the strongest velocity on the 11th – and this is exactly what had happened. The maximum force of the storm did ravage Everest on 11 May just as the forecasters had predicted, with wind speeds equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane. However, the increasing wind speed had reached life-threatening force by 7 p.m. on the evening of 10 May. During daytime on the 11th, there was a lull on the South Col, where the wind mercifully dropped to a strong breeze, but it returned that evening with a vengeance.

I needed to understand why we had experienced this temporary drop in the wind during the daytime of 11 May. I asked Mike Harrison if this lull had been due to the eye of the storm passing over Everest.

Mike responded:

I cast my mind back to 11 May. The wind on the South Col that morning was a strong breeze, but some 3,000 feet above us the South Summit was still being battered by much stronger winds. The two Sherpas who bravely climbed back up, in an attempt to rescue Rob Hall that day, got to within 700 vertical feet of him before being driven back by ferocious winds.

There had not been a lull in the storm. The winds the forecasters had predicted were blowing with the maximum force, it was just that they were thundering past a little over 2,000 feet above us. It looks highly likely that the wave structure Mike suggested had formed, putting the South Col underneath the peak of a wave, bringing relative calm. As the day wore on and the wind speed increased, the wave shifted in position and brought the South Col into a trough; with this came the wind, which was even more powerful than it had been the night before. By the 12th and 13th it weakened considerably but was still blowing.

Given that the storm had come from a steadily increasing wind, at what point did it become a storm and when did it finish? Was this the reason for the phone calls to the London-based weather service, Martin Harris and Roger Bilham – to obtain more specific details so they could ascertain what was likely to unfold over the coming days?

David goes on to write in his book:

These two sentences, to me, seem contradictory. However, this ‘localised weather cell’ he refers to, according to the ECMWF archives, was caused by the development of a jet over a rapidly deepening depression over southern Russia and northern India. The winds this would generate had been abundantly clear on the forecasts for almost a full week before the storm hit Everest.

In August of 2010, I sent David an email with the following, in the hope that he would be able to answer some of the questions left open by my findings:

I received no reply, so I sent the same enquiry to David by registered letter; I got no response to that either.

There is also the book I alluded to,
Everest: Mountain Without Mercy
, by Broughton Coburn, with an afterword by David Breashears, published by National Geographic. Any book that has a National Geographic endorsement on the front cover is seen by the public as almost beyond reproach, an unerring, truthful account that can be relied upon. As outlined earlier, the only mention of accurate weather forecasts being received in Base Camp appeared, from my interpretation of his book, to be after 10 May. I wondered if Broughton Coburn had been told of the earlier forecasts before he wrote the book.

I contacted Broughton and told him I believed the Imax expedition received accurate Met Office weather reports from the very beginning of May 1996, as did a team of Danes from the DMI; that these were being compared, at Base Camp, prior to the disaster of 10 May.

I asked why his book,
Everest
, which I said as far as I could tell was the official publication about the making of the IMAX film, made no mention of these earlier forecasts.

Broughton replied:

I realised that in his response Broughton had referred to the Danish forecasts but not specifically to the Imax one. So I sent Broughton the following question: