Man dies of thirst during survival test

[rodeodance]

Source: ap



Man dies of thirst during survival test

By ED WHITE, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 18 minutes ago

BOULDER, Utah - A man died of thirst during a wilderness-survival exercise designed to test his physical and mental toughness, even though guides had water. They didn't offer him any because they did not want to spoil the character-building experience.
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By Day 2 in the blazing Utah desert, Dave Buschow was in bad shape. Pale, wracked by cramps, his speech slurred, the 29-year-old New Jersey man was desperate for water and hallucinating so badly he mistook a tree for a person.

After going roughly 10 hours without a drink in the 100-degree heat, he finally dropped dead of thirst, face down in the dirt, less than 100 yards from the goal: a cave with a pool of water.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070502/ap_on_re_us/dead_of_thirst;_ylt=ArhZs7zJxPuIIBYSl.aNemes0NUE

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Horrible way to die-----essentially testing your manhood.

Yet, technically-----one can not die of Thirst.

Dehydation, electrolyte imbalance yes-----but not thirst.

[Little Wing]

1. someone's gettin sued

[Hieronymus]

47. I hope..

[ecstatic]

63. personal responsibility?

:shrug: This is tragic, but people have to stick up for themselves in situations like this... and know when to say when. Nobody can make that decision for you.

[Coventina]

66. Um, if you are so out of it that you are talking to trees,

"personal responsibility" is a moot point.

At that point, the people who did not administer help became responsible.

[proud2BlibKansan]

68. Well if they could tell he was talking to trees,

wouldn't that be a clue that he was no longer capable of taking care of himself?

[Virginia Dare]

2. Well, I guess he failed the test?

:wtf:

[Demeter]

58. Pass/Fail Seems Inappropriate For This n/t

[liberalnurse]

3. I guess he failed the survivor test..........

:scared:

[Coventina]

4. Human stupidity never ceases to amaze me.

Note: my post has been edited because I sort of changed my mind & opinion.

[liberalnurse]

14. I bet there is a release of responsibility clause....

They enter the challenge at their own risk, fully informed and may quit anytime. He was not forced.

[Hand]

25. Yep.

From the article:
While regretting the tragedy, the school, known as BOSS, has denied any negligence and instead blamed Buschow, saying the security officer and former Air Force airman did not read course materials, may have withheld health information and may have eaten too heavily before leaving River Vale, N.J., for the grueling course.

Noting Buschow signed liability waivers, the school said: "Mr. Buschow expressly assumed the risk of serious injury or death prior to participating."

[LiberalFighter]

42. They should not rely on someone reading the material

Do the military rely on trainees learning soley by reading?

This so called school knows or should had known the critical elements necessary to survive and made sure the students were fully aware.

[liberalnurse]

55. It's a business.....

The adult needs to be fully aware of what he/she signs ...especially for an elective event/adventure. No deception here.

It's called responsibility. Everyone needs to think, take their time and make informed decisions. If in doubt, seek a second opinion and process options with a confidant.

[LiberalFighter]

57. Businesses have a duty to not hide behind the fine print

[Kingshakabobo]

65. I'm guessing the court/jury will want the school to shoulder......

........some of the responsibility once they hear the victim was delirious, talking to trees and the "expert guides" neglected to give him water or pull the plug on the lesson.

Two things the attorney will key in on:

"expert guide"..... Why use expert guides if they aren't there to look out for the customer. "Experts" are almost always held to a higher standard.

"emergency water".......why carry it if there is no duty to protect the customer. Is "talking to trees" , "swollen mouth" and "delirious" enough to warrant intervention?......I'm guessing the jury will say yes.....and rightfully so.

[triguy46]

45. Won't stop a lawsuit. n/t

[Exultant Democracy]

5. The is nothing unmanly about water, I never go into the desert without

a bunch if I am hiking or driving. The first step in survival is preparation.

[BOSSHOG]

10. I was stationed in the Mojave Desert in the early 70's

(Yes the Navy in the desert) and our first two weeks was survival indoc. From the Ozarks of Arkansas to the Mojave Desert. It was like moving to another planet.

[Exultant Democracy]

53. I moved from New England to Tucson, we sure do have a pretty country

too bad about all the asshats running around.

[BOSSHOG]

6. "Character-building experience?"

I'll stick to Karaoke at the Cat's Meow on Bourbon Street to build my character. Nothing more entertaining then a 52 year old bald headed white guy wailing Little Pink Houses.

[theoldman]

7. The guy must have had a physical problem.

In Texas this would be just another day. You have to be acclimated to the heat.

[Coventina]

11. Well, it did say he was from New Jersey.

But no matter what, 10 hours is a long time to go with no fluids.

[rodeodance]

18. 10 hrs in the HOT sun. Dehydration sets in fast

[Manifestor_of_Light]

24. Nope. People in Texas are NOT used to the heat.

That's why we have central air. And it doesn't cool off at night because of the humidity, unless you're in West Texas or maybe the Panhandle. As far as it cooling off at night, you have to get as far north as Oklahoma City for the humidity to be low enough for that to happen in the summer.

I got heat exhaustion from playing racquetball in an air conditioned gym (but probably at 75 degrees) and had to go to the emergency room, because I was vomiting uncontrollably, had an awful headache and was dehydrated.

No more racquetball.

Thousands of people have died in the past from heat exhaustion and heat stroke, before there was air conditioning, and people still die from lack of air conditioning.

On the Gulf Coast in July and August and September, the LOW temperature at night is about 78 degrees and quite humid. I know. I grew up without A/C and was totally miserable. Many a night I couldn't sleep and I read Michener novels.

[CreekDog]

32. You dehydrate more quickly in the desert, especially at altitude

That comment about Texas is one of the stupider comments (pretending to be smart) that I've seen recently.

[cigsandcoffee]

48. You don't drink anything under the hot sun in Texas?

I'm in Florida, and we sure do.

[bleedingheart]

8. Gosh what do they call this "experience" the Bataan Death March?

[xultar]

9. For survival you should be able to drink your own urine.

[tandot]

12. He'll be nominated for the Darwin Awards

http://darwinawards.com/darwin/

I don't have a lot of compassion for people who do stupid sh*t like that for the "fun" of it.

[Tempest]

16. He may have lost his life

But he might have won an award.

Oh the irony.

[Up2Late]

36. That was my first reaction too.

What a dork.:banghead:

[LiberalFighter]

59. It would seem he won the award automatically

[Mojambo]

13. When you start talking to tree, you've failed the excercise.

At that point it shoulda been over and he should have got the water.

It's ridiculous that you have to effing DIE to fail this thing.

[nashville_brook]

15. The course is intended to push people "past THOSE FALSE LIMITS your mind has set for your body."

hmmm -- maybe that "limited" mind should be listened to every now and then.

[Sapere aude]

17. Some people have to prove to themselves something. I don't know what but it sounds fucked up to me.

So you survive a survival course. What does that do for you? Now you can believe in yourself? Why not do that anyway? Life itself is a survival course. You can't ever win. In the end you die. No one gets out alive!

[Duer 157099]

19. He should have watched Survivorman and Man vs. Wild first

Both of those shows had episodes in the Utah desert, around Canyonlands.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

20. I have seen bullshit like this.

I spent a lot of years involved in martial arts and martial arts schools and some schools make black belt testing like Navy SEALS BUD/S Hell Week, only worse. Totally over the top, brutal and ill-advised. I have seen water withheld from people being tested in brutally hot and humid conditions. I have seen people collapse.

While being "tested" by fat, out-of-shape, brutal losers, people who, if they did not have that black belt, would be just another jamoke. A loser.

On the other hand, I have seen great schools, run by great men, where you walk in and gi up, they hand you your new black belt and you go back to training. The philosophy is you don't need to be tested, you have already proven yourself.

Guess which one I think is a lot more sane.

Little men do things like in the original post: They make people live up to standards that they cannot meet, themselves. And people get sick, get brutalized, get hurt or die. The great ones have no need of such things.

[SoxFan]

35. With one difference

BUD/S, Ranger school, Q-Course, etc, all have strict protocols to prevent this sort of stupidity from occuring. My guess is that these "instructors" are a bunch of clueless wannabes.

[tabasco]

37. True. There have been deaths in the Ranger Course, however.

Mostly from hypothermia.

[lazyriver]

21. Depriving one's body of water is not so much a test

of mental toughness as it is an excercise in stupidity. It doesn't build character either. A wilderness survival excercise, by definition, should teach one how to SURVIVE in the wilderness not die in it when water is actually available.

Nominated for a Darwin Award...

[KittyWampus]

54. Sorry, but I think the Darwin Award goes to the "Instructors". The guy FAILED when he talked

to a tree and was convulsing.

What the fuck is the point in continuing the "test"?

[TwilightGardener]

22. Jesus, what a bunch of dumbasses.

[Rambis]

23. Darwin awards nominee (nm)

c

[depakid]

26. "led by expert guides"

Apparently their expertise didn't extend to basic medicine.

[TwilightGardener]

27. Basic medicine? How about "common sense"?

[Bette Noir]

28. Comon sense

is that you don't go hiking if it's 100 degrees out.

I've taken a survival class in the Utah desert. Our guide took a fall and broke both legs. We were helicoptered out. No fatalities, thank Heaven. This was back in the '70s, before cell phones. Except for our guide, we were all minors.

Any survival school that has *any* fatalities should lose it's license, in my humble opinion. If anyone dies, the school is obviously unqualified to teach survival skills.

[momster]

38. Common sense? How 'bout simple humanity?

nt

[tiptoe]

29. "'He said he could not go on,' staff member O'Neal wrote...[He] didn't inform Buschow about his

emergency water."

Could/Should not more "professional" steps have been taken by the PRESUMABLY KNOWLEDGABLE/TRAINED PAID EXPERT staff member WITH THE EMERGENCY WATER (O'Neal) to assess by some objective measures the degree of emergency of client Buschow in lieu of just 'wanting him to accomplish getting to the water...'?

"I wanted him to accomplish getting to the water and the cave for rest," he wrote. "He asked me to go get the water for him. I said I was not going to leave him. ... Shortly thereafter I had a bad feeling and turned to Dave and found no sign of breathing."

Liability agreements notwithstanding, someone seems derelict in failure-to-deliver/withholding available provisions INTENDED for emergency.

Well, at least the client was "allowed" to die with character...and honor(!)...leaving plenty of emergency water for the others.
:patriot:

Josh Bernstein, keep up the good work! NGU!!

http://tinyurl.com/QKK23

[Occulus]

34. That's what makes me think there's more to it they're not saying

This guy did NOT need to die. I'm unpleasantly reminded of the water-drinking radio stunt some weeks back...

[kestrel91316]

30. I've been on hikes with the Sierra Club in hot weather and remote areas.....

They MAKE you bring up to a gallon of water with you for a day hike. And you drink it ALL before you get back to the car.

Deliberately dehydrating oneself in hot weather while hiking is stupid. Encouraging someone else to do so is criminal.

[muriel_volestrangler]

52. They *prevented* him filling his water bottle at the start of the day

On the second day, after a cool night, the group set out around sunrise and stopped about 8:30 a.m. to dip their cups into Deer Creek in what turned out to be the only water until evening. Buschow pulled a bottle from his pack — but was warned by the staff not to fill it.

During the early phase of the expedition, participants can drink water at the source only and cannot carry it with them.

That seems at least criminally negligent. He knew what he needed to do to survive in such a hot climate - and they stopped him doing it. I think by doing that, they assumed responsibility for the outcome. Note this also means the other participants couldn't have helped him. What the organisers did was therefore outrageous - they were the only ones capable of reversing their earlier mistake.

Buschow had been hallucinating for hours before he died. People were carrying his belongings for him (hey, look, this 'self-reliance' test had failed already anyway). They were running this course as if dying could be a favourable outcome - because you'd 'learn about yourself' in the process.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

31. If I were that guy's family, I'd SUE the "survival program"

so that every other such "program" would be terrified of deliberately endangering the lives of its participants.

[Occulus]

33. There has to be a LOT more to this

Take a look:

http://www.rememberdave.net/

This is a link to his remembrance page.

Poor guy. I think something went horribly wrong with the people who were doing this stunt.

Take a look at his 'accomplishments' page; there's certificate after certificate. I come to the conclusion that this guy wasn't all that dumb. Maybe he had a physical condition nobody knew anything about, but in light of the admitted behavior of the people who were "in charge" of this, I think there's more to what happened that they're not telling us.

Something about all this does not ring true, like a repeated single sour note in a counterpoint.

I think something went wrong, and badly.

[superconnected]

40. Thanks for posting that site. This guy was no idiot.

When he was talking to a tree, was when they should have stepped in and given him water.

[colorado_ufo]

70. He may have had a virus coming on that he wasn't aware of -

or some other TEMPORARY condition. Ever wake up feeling fine, then get sick as hell later in the day, under perfectly normal conditions? This was a poorly constructed "exercise" inexcusably unsupervised.

The egotistical, uneducated, brainless wonders who conducted this "exercise" are criminally negligent. And that is the kindest thing that I can say for these sadistic jerks.

[Barrett808]

39. Reminds of that woman killed by Dahn Yoga at their Arizona compound

She died of dehydration as "masters" looked on.

[Obamarama]

41. This, my friends, is Darwinism in action.....

The human gene pool has just been rid of some really dim gene stock. It's sad and tragic that the guy died, but anyone who would agree to something so extreme isn't exactly the brightest bulb on the string.

[Bonobo]

43. Gutless wimps not getting laid is also "Darwinism in action". Just sayin'...

[triguy46]

44. There's a word for this: stupidity n/t

[Screwfly]

46. How fast heat kills

I'm astounded the guy survived 10 hrs. in desert without water before he died.

Its unbelievable how fast people can died in desert in the summer time. I remember a case where a woman and her kids were found dead from the heat only 50 yards from their broken down SUV near the Colorado River. The day time temp at the time was somewhere in 120's.

[leftofthedial]

49. good thing they didn't interrupt

his test of "manhood"

[NuttyFluffers]

50. exactly. why doesn't someone think of the built character?

:eyes:

i'm waiting for the slashed artery 1k run (to the hospital). think of the macho bragging rights! and there'll be scars, too!

[truthisfreedom]

51. Darwin award by proxy?

Assisted death, I'd call it.

[pinniped]

56. See, the human body doesn't really need water in 100-degree heat.

It's all in the mind. Hell, needing food is all in your mind, too.

The course is intended to push people "past those false limits your mind has set for your body."

[Strathos]

60. They should sue his family for him being so stupid

This is the "mans" fault and no one else.

[muriel_volestrangler]

62. At what point do you think he should have attacked the guides?

They walked one day; then the guides prevented him filling up his water bottle the next morning. If he had done so, would the guides have given him any help to get back to the starting point? We don't know - but probably not, given the way they behaved later. So should he have gone along with the guides, and then mugged them for the water they denied him? Used his knife to force them to take him back? Were all the other clients equally stupid for not turning back that morning?

[dkofos]

61. I nominate him for the 2007 Darwin Awards

[hedgehog]

64. These guys are experst until someone gets killed.

What about the guides who take peole white water rafting? The assumption is that somehow they know what they are doing, but htere's no certification anyplace. There are probably dozens of these survival outfits out there, totally unregulated but somehow able to convince the customers that they are experts.

[rocktivity]

67. But did he PASS the test?

:eyes:
rocknation

[Zynx]

69. Um, idiot alert?

If you're going to be doing hardcore survival stuff, at least educate yourself on what's involved.