Felicia’s Puzzle Question

Test your lateral thinking skills on the most face-palmingly stupid rescue of the 21st Century! There’s no right answer to how this happened, but there is a right question. Can you guess it by the end of the article?

Being outdoorsy myself, I’m always interested in search-and-rescue stories  (and search-and-body recovery stories). When I saw this headline of a caving rescue, I just had to know.

Grand Canyon Caverns tourists trapped 200 feet below ground finally rescued after almost 30 hours

h ttps://www.theblaze.com/news/grand-canyon-caverns-tourists-trapped-200-feet-below-ground-finally-rescued-after-almost-30-hours

By Cortney Weil, October 25, 2022

This one could be nasty! I did a serious caving trip one time, to see if spelunking could be my next big thing. It was fun, interesting and one of the more emotionally traumatic experiences of my life. Big men of wanderlust do not belong head-first and upside-down in tiny cracks with nicknames such as “the pancake press”.

Five tourists, trapped 200 feet below ground in the Grand Canyon Caverns after an elevator malfunctioned, have now finally been brought back to the surface.

On Sunday afternoon, a family of eight touring the Grand Canyon Caverns, the “largest dry caverns in the U.S.A.,” became trapped when the elevator, which transports people from the surface to the caverns below, malfunctioned. While three members of the group were able to negotiate the 21 flights of stairs available to ascend to the earth’s surface, five people — including an infant and a toddler — remained behind, either because they could not risk the arduous trek or they chose to stay back with loved ones.

What? Whaaat? “Arduous trek” of ten stories’ worth of staircase? You don’t choose to be stuck.

If the tour guides were anything like the gleefully-dirty simian contortionists I caved with, they could’ve humped a family of five up 200ft of stairs no trouble. I could’ve done that. Why call the fire department?

The incident was frightening for everyone involved, and one woman, identified only as Felicia, even ran out of diapers and formula for her babies, which made the situation all the more urgent.

“It’s gonna blow any minute!”

“The gas pocket?”

“The infant! Hurry!”

“We have a search and rescue team standing by as well as a hoisting apparatus to lift people out if the repairs take longer than expected or if people are not comfortable staying down there,” Coconino County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Jon Paxton said on Monday.

By late Monday evening though, all the trapped tourists had been rescued one at a time using the “hoisting apparatus.” Each individual rescue took about 25 minutes.

This was a puzzle, how that level of Stupid could be reached.

Felicia: “We’re trapped!”

Hypothetical me: “Or, we could take the stairs.”

Felicia: “I’ll never make it!”

Me: “Fine, let me at least save your baby. I only need one hand to hold the rail.”

“Nah, she’ll be fine here, trapped underground with me.”

The elevator malfunction is believed to have been mechanical.

Are you ready for the big reveal? The question that explains everything?

Here it comes…

JUST HOW FAT WAS SHE?!

That explains everything… the elevator breaking down in the first place, the refusal/inability to use stairs even with assistance, why Mommy was trapped underground but didn’t let her kids escape, and why S&R needed thirty hours to set up a hoist when that’s part of their standard job & kit. I don’t have photographic evidence… the file was too big to download… so there’s nothing to prove me wrong!

More reading between the lines:

Crew discusses rescue at Grand Canyon Caverns

h ttps://www.abc15.com/news/state/crew-discusses-rescue-at-grand-canyon-caverns

By Ashley Paredez, 27 October 2022

GRAND CANYON, AZ — The Coconino County Search & Rescue Unit helped three family members who were stuck underground at the Grand Canyon Caverns on Monday.

I presume the other two were the kids carried up the stairs after Waffle the Hutt was strapped in.

They hoisted them up through an elevator shaft, nearly 200 feet, after the elevator they rode down in broke.

Yo Mama so fat, the elevator only went down!

“Normally we’re out in the wilderness, we have trees to work with,” said Lisa Callan with Coconino Co. Search & Rescue.

This was the unit’s first-ever elevator shaft rescue, with 11 volunteers and additional help from Flagstaff Fire Department.

Also, their first whale rescue.

In this case, they had to use their truck as their anchor.

Yo Mama SO fat, the fire truck was the counterweight!

Once everything was set in place, they planned out the safest approach… Rescue operations leader Adam Barnhart helped place each person, one by one, inside a hammock-like chair made with rescue-grade material.

Your local hospital uses such slings to move fat people through the hospital like beef carcasses. Suspended from reinforced tracks in the ceiling, they can safely carry up to 1,000lbs of oval animal with little effort. The surgeons I knew called them Orca Lifts.

It’s not something that rescue personnel keep handy because… well… the people who get lost in the wilderness are the people thin enough to reach the wilderness. Also, you’re never lost when you’re visible from space.

The only alternate route up, the stairs, wasn’t an option for everyone.

“In fact, I opted to come up on the rope, on the rope system at the end of the operation, as opposed to using the emergency fire escape stairs they had built into the shaft… because I felt our rope system was far more secure,” said Barnhart.

“And I was tired.” Secured with the combined weight of a fire truck and 11 volunteers, with a capacity measured in tonnage, it probably WAS safer.

Now, three days later, an inspection of the elevator is underway before it is clear for use.

New rule for the staff: don’t let anybody down the elevator that you can’t hump back up the stairs.

Let us spare a thought for the elevators heading into dangerous places, who die a little each day so the Foolish Americans With Disabilities Act can live.