A Day to Die For: 1996: Everest's Worst Disaster - One Survivor's Personal Journey to Uncover the Truth (36 page)

And last on my list but certainly not least:

Now, as there was no mention of the Imax expedition receiving a weather forecast before 10 May, this could easily leave the reader of the educational resource under the impression that none were being received prior to the disaster. That only as a result thereof did they think it might be a good idea to get one.

The Imax expedition had been in the planning and preparation stages for some considerable time – around two years. During this period, they had the body of the IMAX camera specially crafted out of magnesium to reduce weight. In certain critical areas, metal bearings were replaced with plastic, and synthetic drive belts were added for their flexibility at low temperatures. They had a reputed filming budget of $7 million, along with ten scientific advisers. The plan was to cover every possible eventuality they could in advance. Surely an accurate weather forecast, if available, would have been almost top of their list?

A second approach to the National Science Foundation was the next logical step. Public funding brought with it open access through freedom of information.

Sitting at the computer in our front room, surrounded by countless magazines and pieces of paper with my scribbled lists of copies I’d yet to obtain, I made contact.

It appeared the IMAX film had been funded through the foundation’s Informal Science Education Programme, of which David Ucko was the current head. He passed my enquiry on to Programme Director Valentine Kass to deal with.

I suppose it was inevitable at some point that I would feel I was going around in circles, as names I’d already contacted cropped up again. I let David know I’d already been in contact with Valentine, setting out the difficulties I’d encountered after following his advice.

David replied:

I wrote to David once again and pushed the point as far as I dared. I asked him if the work covered by the grant came under the Freedom of Information Act, querying if it would be possible to either pass my email contact on to Hyman Field, or if indeed their own records might provide the answer.

I explained to David my surprise at what appeared to me as the ‘almost’ avoidance of an obvious and valuable resource – the weather, meteorology and forecasting – in the educational material produced to complement the IMAX film: exactly the sort of material the public money had paid for. This, combined with the apparent inability of MacGillivray Freeman Films to answer my questions fully and without difficulty, for whatever reason, made me uneasy, and I was straight with David about my concerns.

David’s response indicated they’d given me as much as they had available to them; there was no cover-up or conspiracy. The information he sent set out the project in clear terms – its aims, the funding and the names of those connected to it. In the meantime, he’d contacted Hyman Field, who in turn had suggested I contact David Breashears, the Imax expedition leader, or Roger Bilham, a geophysicist from the University of Colorado, who’d accompanied the team.

David Ucko concluded his reply by writing:

As a result of my communication with the National Science Foundation, I came away with further leads I could follow up. Roger Bilham and David Breashears had been specifically mentioned.

David Breashears, leader of the Imax expedition and the film director, was already top of my list of people to contact, if I could find information to corroborate what I had been told by Rob Hall’s Sirdar. Only then could I make a reasoned and sensible approach to open a dialogue with David on the subject.

Following up Hyman Field’s other suggestion, I emailed Roger Bilham at Colorado University to ask if he knew the source of the weather forecasts for the 1996 Imax expedition.

Roger replied saying he’d left Base Camp before the storm hit. That he’d needed to return to the US to teach the rest of the semester. However, David Breashears, still on Everest, had contacted him in the US after the disaster to see if Roger could give him any kind of clue about inbound weather. Roger approached Howard Hansen, a colleague and meteorologist at CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences) in Colorado, where they downloaded satellite images.

Unfortunately, Roger had copied my email to David Breashears, whom I had not wanted to contact quite yet. My hand being forced, I contacted David but at the same time quickly sent another email to Roger Bilham. Again, I asked Roger if he was aware of who had provided the weather forecasts and at what date he’d left the expedition to return to the US.

Roger’s response:
‘I was unaware of any weather forecast at Base Camp. I left because I had to administer final exams, but I have no record of the date. The person that would remember is Audrey Salkeld, the author and Everest historian.’

Audrey had been a member of the Imax expedition. Later in my research I would come across Audrey Salkeld’s reports from the Imax expedition Base Camp. In her report dated 19 April 1996, she stated that Roger Bilham had already left Base Camp. He’d left mid-April, at least three weeks before the storm hit Everest – a time at which the team would not have been acclimatised or ready to start considering weather forecasts for a summit attempt. Therefore, Roger being unaware of any weather forecasts being received at Base Camp was completely understandable. If I’d known at the time what date he’d left Base Camp, I would have asked him if he knew if weather forecasts had been pre-arranged for the beginning of May in 1996. I never did ask him that question.

In the same reply, Roger went on to say:
‘My understanding of the phone calls I got from David when I returned was that the intensity of the storm was a huge surprise.’
Interestingly, this would indicate that David knew the storm was coming; it was the intensity that took them by surprise.

However, what Roger Bilham and Howard Hansen had confirmed was that the storm that hit Everest on the afternoon of 10 May 1996 was not some ‘typical Everest squall’, as some authors have suggested. A day or two after the storm had hit Everest, it could still be seen on the satellite imagery heading east.

The original email I sent to Roger, which he’d forwarded to David Breashears, was replied to. Roger passed the response he received from David on to me. In this email, David had written:
‘In 1996 I used the London-based Met Office. If Graham would like more information he should feel free to contact me.’

At face value, this appeared a very open and helpful approach. I took David up on his kind offer and sent him a brief email asking if he could help me with a few more details.

In this I wrote:

After nearly two weeks, I’d received no reply. Assuming that David was probably quite a busy man, I sent a polite follow-up.

The reply came back:
‘I got your message but will need a little time to locate the nine-year-old Everest Imax files.’

I received no further communication.

Two years later (March 2007), I was to resend my original email to David Breashears, to once again give him an opportunity to make comment or input into my research.

I neither received, nor expected to receive, any reply.

The only way I could reconcile the two pieces of information I’d gathered regarding the Imax team – Breashears saying he used the London-based Met Office, and Ang Tshering’s declaration that Rob and Scott watched Imax, who had the weather – was if the Imax team had been receiving weather forecasts prior to the disaster of 10 May, because after that date Rob and Scott were dead, leaving what Breashears and Ang Tshering had told me as incompatible. The problem was, nothing I’d read confirmed this theory.

In an attempt to resolve this, I contacted the UK Met Office, under the Freedom of Information Act, to enquire if they’d supplied the Imax expedition weather forecasts in the spring of 1996. My assumption was that they’d be able to determine this from their forecast records and finance department, along with the dates and number of forecasts supplied.

Hopeful this would give me the break I’d been looking for, I was devastated by the unexpected reply:

It seemed I’d missed the information I needed by one year.

In an effort to sustain my enquiries on both sides of the Atlantic, I carefully went through the detailed information I’d received from the National Science Foundation, amongst which was the name of Peter Molnar, a Senior Research Associate in Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (now a professor at the University of Colorado). I emailed Peter to enquire whether his involvement with the Imax expedition was connected to weather forecasts or if his role had purely been on a consultancy basis in the US after the filming had been completed.

In his reply, Peter came straight to the point. He felt that those making the film were only interested in sensationalism and that the science within the programme was, at best, very limited compared to what had initially been proposed. In his opinion, the substantial grant of $1.5 million from the NSF had been squandered. I must admit I sympathised with Peter Molnar’s sentiments. I found the educational material very disappointing compared to what could have been achieved for such a large sum of money. Noticeably lacking, in my opinion, was the content.

I contacted the National Centre for Atmospheric Research and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), in the United States. These two, jointly operated by the UCAR, hold a substantial archive of meteorological data.

My initial correspondence was with Joey Comeaux, Leslie Forehand and Will Spangler. I informed them I was researching the disaster on Everest in 1996 and asked if they could look at the information they had archived and compare the forecasts to what actually happened. Joey Comeaux was the one who took over this task, something he did with great dedication.

It was when I received one of the many emails from Joey that my heart sank. It read:

The phrase that immediately came to mind was ‘Fortune favours the brave’. I also hoped it favoured the blindly optimistic, as I hadn’t got a clue what Joey was talking about.

Lay persons, like myself, assume that meteorology is merely a way of telling us if it’s going to rain, about the wind, the temperature and other such variables that will determine our schedules on a day-to-day basis. Clearly, although I never considered it was quite that simple, this is a very complex subject that well deserves the title ‘Atmospheric Sciences’.

I was completely out of my depth. These good people, with an already hectic workload, were going out of their way to make considerable time to research this for me. Joey’s suggestion of plots seemed to be the most logical. If I had these, then maybe I could find a meteorologist at one of the universities close to where I lived to interpret them for me. I gratefully accepted Joey’s suggestion of receiving them in this form. Despite the many other demands of his own work, this is exactly what he provided me with.