Situations do not start out to include Human Error. We don’t wake up in the morning and say “I’m going to have a life threatening event today.” At least most of us don’t say that, there are a few you read about in the Darwin awards… Human error in our professional and personal lives usually starts out very benign and those innocent benign factors combine to create that error chain resulting in a minor or sometimes significant (life threatening) problem.

Myself and three mountain climber friends of mine are heading to the Cordillera Blanca region of Peru this coming May. In our first planning meeting our discussions bounced all over the place, from simple logistics of getting there to the actual climbs themselves. Of course the discussions always came back to the climbing routes and how high we would be climbing. All of us have summited peaks to at least 19,000 feet. The peaks we are looking at top off at around 22,000 feet. Most routes are ice and snow including the world famous snow flutes, unconsolidated steep snow mush.

Alpine climbing is kind of a silly sport. To move over terrain quick enough to avoid all the objective dangers out there you must go light. Going light means carrying as little as possible but still having enough equipment and provisions to actually pull off getting to the top. A balancing act which is ripe for human error.

I later thought about our conversations and came to the realization that I was beginning the error chain. I even opened up one thought of how each team of two climbers could “get away” with only 1 rope each. We could then combine forces at the top and use the two ropes together to rappel down. Wow sounds like a great way to shave off a few pounds of weight. Only a number of problems “could” emerge. “What if” the other climbing team does not make it to the top or they get in trouble? What if, what if, what if…

Another error chain beginning was how to “cheat” the acclimatization process. The effects of high altitude does not favor anyone. The amount of time you put into working your body to high altitude is how you keep from getting sick. Because our trip is only 2 ½ weeks we talked about the need to quickly adjust and how we could speed up the process. I have been sick up high and it is a helpless feeling.

I have been on the road a lot lately so our more recent Emails have been started to tap into each of our experiences. We are now thinking more logically about how to safely go about having a productive trip to Peru. “If we bag one summit it will be a great trip!” Experience and an open line of communication between individuals can help to lessen the amount of errors out there. Team work will help us to be resilient to the errors that we will face even in the best of conditions.

This story about personal human error can be place right into our firefighting lives. After all we as humans make all the decisions regarding error, stands to reason that we can mitigate or at least lessen the severity.