Benazir Bhutto
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Tracked by millions
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Apparently, I’m only one of millions who closely followed the Kim tragedy in the news. MSNBC.com got 1 million hits in 90 minutes and SFGate.com got 3,300 hits per minute in the hour after the body was found. The story got more attention than the Iraq Study Group report.
More articles that have fed my unrelenting curiosity:
- The mother and daughters were spotted first by a local pilot who had a hunch as to their location. He flew out on his own to look for them. The wrong turn they made off the National Forest road is a common mistake by drivers because the correct road looks narrower than the other road they took that had no outlet (and was supposed to be gated but wasn’t).
- Someone drew a map of James Kim’s hike around the forest and where his body was found, heartbreakingly close to the family car but impossible to reach due to cliffs on either side of the creek they found him floating in. If he had continued a few miles on the road in the direction they were driving, he would have found a vacant fishing resort which the rescuers checked several times.
- James Kim relied on an old survival tactic that has fallen out of favor because it often leads to hypothermia – i.e. following a creek or river in the hope of finding houses alongside them. This choice led to him actually swimming through the icy creek and getting soaking wet.
- Autopsy results show cause of death as hypothermia and exposure. He thought the closest town, Galice, was 4 miles away, when it was actually 15 miles away. The family heard helicopters twice before James struck out on his own.
- He was probably dead for only a few hours, appearing to have slipped and fallen on some mossy rocks in the creek where his body was found.
The Kim family ordeal
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Timeline: The Kim family ordeal
The trip that ended with Kati Kim and her two daughters rescued and James Kim dead began with a family vacation at Thanksgiving. Here is a timeline of how events unfolded, according to family and friends:
Saturday, Nov. 25
After visits in Seattle and Portland, the Kims were headed to Gold Beach, but they missed the turnoff to Highway 42 south of Roseburg and decided to take a shortcut north of Grants Pass, heading west.
They drove up Bear Camp Road, which becomes a single-lane road. Although fine during summer, the road often is impassable in winter because of snow. Rescuers have to go up every year to bring back travelers who get stuck in the snow.
At one point, they had to get out of their car and remove rocks from the road. It was snowing hard, and the Kims apparently could not continue on Bear Camp Road in their all-wheel drive Saab station wagon. They tried to back up, but turned down a Bureau of Land Management road. The agency closes it off with a locked gate in the winder, but somebody had vandalized the gate, leaving it open.
They drove the side road about 15 miles to get below the snow line. They stopped for the night at a fork in the road at about the 3,000-foot elevation.
Sunday, Nov. 26
When they woke up, it had snowed so much overnight that they were trapped.
They drank melted snow water. The parents ate berries, saving what little food they had for their two children. 4-year-old Penelope and 7-month-old Sabine had baby food and crackers. Kati Kim also nursed her two daughters.
The temperatures were in the mid-20s and they tried to save their gas by running the car periodically to keep warm.
Two text messages sent to the family’s cell phone early this day would help authorities and family narrow the search.
Wednesday, Nov. 29
On about Wednesday, they began burning their tires to keep warm and also hoping the smoke would alert searchers. But the tires apparently burned out before searchers could see it.
Friday, Dec. 1
A formal search is launched for the family, involving agencies across Southern Oregon.
Saturday, Dec. 3
After being trapped for six days, James Kim left his family at about 7:45 in the morning. He told them he would be back by 1 p.m. if he didn’t find anything.
James Kim apparently walked back up the side road about 3 miles before leaving the road and heading downhill toward a creek, Big Windy Creek. At some point he left a pair of gray pants behind and continued downhill. He got out of the snow near the creek and apparently headed east, toward the Rogue River.
Monday, Dec. 4
A helicopter hired by the Kim family found Kati waving an umbrella. She and the two girls were airlifted out by helicopter and were in good shape.
Tuesday, Dec. 5
Searchers had found two gray long-sleeve shirts, a red short-sleeved T-shirt, one wool sock, a girl’s blue skirt and pieces of an Oregon state map, according to Hastings.
Today, Dec. 6
James Kim’s body is found shortly after noon.
Sigh. There are a lot of opinions on this incident, many of which are at the SF Gate blog. Despite the insensitivity of some of the 280 or so comments, I was fascinated by the variety of people’s reactions. Some were sympathetic and found no fault with the couple, preferring to encourage readers simply to have hope that James Kim would be found alive. Others gave wilderness survival advice and pointed out all the Kims’ mistakes, which they saw as having a cascading effect ultimately leading to disaster. The commenters reacted to each other and some ended up in a comment war.
My obsession with this incident (and it is an obsession…I have spent hours reading about it online) is strange and unexpected. I think it’s because I am a big “regret” person who is always thinking of the shoulda’s and coulda’s. To this day I still feel really sad and depressed when I think about how my wedding video didn’t turn out and how easily it could have been prevented.
Same with this tragedy with James Kim. It didn’t have to happen. We all make mistakes and have close calls, but some choices can kill you, and that’s what happened here. The chain reaction went like this:
They got a late start on the 296 mile drive from Portland to Gold Beach, Oregon. They stopped by a tourist center and asked for scenic routes to Gold Beach. They ate dinner in Roseburg and left the restaurant at 8:30pm to drive the remaining 138 miles, in the dark. They missed the turnoff to the 42 West and decided to take a Forest Service road, whose turnoff was almost 40 miles south of the 42 West turnoff. (Why??? I mean, on the map it looks a little shorter and more direct to Gold Beach than Highway 42, but even then you can see how thin and curvy and full of switchbacks it is!)
They didn’t see the entrance sign warning the road is dangerous in the winter, or ignored it if they did. Then as it started to rain, then snow, they kept going even though they had to get out of the car and move rocks off the road. They backed into a side road that should have been gated but was not due to vandalism. They slept in the car overnight because they were too tired to keep going – because they got a late start, and should have stayed the night in Roseburg or any number of cities along Interstate 5.
All the way to the end, it seems that James Kim made bad choices – his last apparent choice was to leave the road and go down a decline to follow along a river, which perhaps he thought would lead to civilization. He made this choice somehow by consulting a map he carried with him.
Anyway. No matter how much I think about this and analyze it, I am continually baffled and saddened at all the bad luck this couple had. I’ve driven on dangerous mountain roads at night before and risked driving in snow without chains, and I was fine. After this, I wouldn’t do any of that without adequate preparation. I am grateful to be in my element (suburbia) most of the time.
I mean, just look at the Google Earth image of where their car was found. (Type in +42° 37’ 50.52”, -123° 47’ 23.64.) Scary, even after the snow has melted! And if you look at it in “Map” mode, without the satellite image, and zoom in a bit, you can see all the tiny vein-like logging roads winding everywhere. It is a maze.
It is a miracle the mother and children were found, thanks to a cell phone ping from the family cell phone to a nearby cell tower that gave their general area, and Kati Kim’s own resourcefulness in taping reflective tape to an umbrella and waving it around.
This makes me all the more cautious when using online maps to plan my trips. If you type in Grants Pass, OR to Gold Beach, OR, it shows the route the Kims took. It makes sense because it’s the most direct route, but the safe route is to take the 99 into California and 101 back up the coast to Oregon. Some mapping programs do it that way, some don’t. Google and Yahoo don’t.
OK, I need to stop obsessing so I can get some work done. Let me know your thoughts if you are so inclined. It’s just so sad.