GPS Didn’t Come To The Rescue — Because Someone Couldn’t Calculate Real ROI
Am I the only one a bit mystified and appalled by this?
TAKOTNA, Alaska (AP) — A 61-year-old rookie Iditarod musher turned up on the wrong trail Thursday, hours after race officials started to search for the woman thought lost along a treacherous stretch.
Deborah Bicknell of Juneau was spotted from the air driving her team through Ptarmigan Pass, a route formerly used in the race, said race spokesman Chas St. George.
“It appears she took the wrong trail,” St. George said.
She was seen driving her dog team 18 miles from the Rohn checkpoint, where she arrived late Thursday. Other information about her was not immediately available…. read the full CNN story here:
OK, here we have what has become probably the most historic and closely followed dog race in the world. We have a small fortune in special sleds, racing equipment, hundreds of expensive and beloved canine athletes and a bunch of brave, if half-crazy mushers, racing across some of the most demanding and physically dangerous country in the world.
And this lady takes a wrong turn … as others have done before her and and others will no doubt do in the future. And in the year 2007 with GPS even tracking Big Pussy Bompensaro’s golf cart and high school kids playing GPS hide and seek with their cell phones … and we send these teams out into the wilderness without a real time GPS?
Come on. This isn’t only stupid and callous, it’s bad economics. In just the short time this lady was missing they launched two fixed wind search aircraft and an Alaska State trooper helicopter. In Alaska you can bet the airplanes would lease for a couple hundred an hour and reasonable cost for a helicopter and a couple pilot-trained Troopers would be what, a thousand and hour at least?
The true cost of any decision is the cost of the foregone alternative. This makes no economic as well as safety sense it’s being cheap for the goal of being cheap rather than efficient.
The cheap in this case undoubtedly cost more than leasing a decent satellite-based tracking unit … there are many I’m familiar with and that I know will work under race conditions and tracking the contestants for their own safety as well as for ordinary race logistics and management.
Right after I saw this news I went looking for a site with live tracking and I found several sites, even some run by professionals who didn’t seem to know the difference between actually tracking the contestants and posting their positions on Google Earth after the fact based on where the organizers reported they were instead of where they actually were. Folks if you don’t measure, you can’t manage. knowing where your race teams are after they get there is not good enough.
Return On Investment, people, ROI. let’s see if next year we can do things a little more smartly and a little more safely … as well as add some entertainment value, ok?