Associate Professor in the School of the Environment, Faculty of Science, The University of Queensland.
Group Leader, Venom Evolution Lab, School of the Environment and Director, Australian Biomolecular Interaction Facility, The University of Queensland.
Founder, BGF Safety Consulting.
Bryan's biodata
Webinar topic: Everything, everywhere, all at once: film production safety in remote environments
Brief: Remote work of any type comes with unique safety challenges, but even more so in the high pressure environment of film production. Nowhere more so than work in caves.
- Physical hazards include rockfalls, flashfloods, and cold damp areas.
- Chemical hazards include oxygen displacing and toxic gases such as carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulphide, and sulphur dioxide.
- Biological hazards include lethal fungi such as Histoplasmosis and venomous scorpions, snakes, and spiders, and mosquito spread diseases like malaria and dengue.
This talk will cover such hazards encountered while leading an expedition into the iconic Tayos Cave in the Ecuadorian tropical Andes mountains. Including the additional hazards in the form of security risks as the filming involved an extremely high profile A-list Hollywood star being on set as the core of the film editing.
The normal security features had to be enhanced as, considered extremely safe until recently, Ecuador has been plagued by a high level of drug cartel-driven violence, including the recent assassination of the anti-cartel presidential candidate posed to win the upcoming election.
Additional hazards included the exploration aspect of the expedition, which included the first-in-history descents through the Daylight Shaft, previously long considered an impossible route into the cave as it involved a 90 meter drop straight through a crack in the Tayos Cave’s Daylight Cathedral.
As the cave was only accessible by helicopter, all materials and generators for the building of the Base Camp had to be airlifted in. Helicopter access was between 8.30am and 3pm, leaving only a 6.5 hour window available each day (weather cooperating) in which any injured team member could be airlifted out to a medical facility.
This meant that for 17.5 hours of each day, any medical emergency needed to be managed on-site, including surgical stabilisation of traumatic impact injuries such as compound fractures with blocking of normal blood flow.
All of this necessitated in a safety team of 12 people, including a wildness specialised emergency medicine doctor and two paramedics onsite. As there were over 70 people onsite, there needed to be effective communication capable of reaching any part of the cave being accessed during the expedition. Such a communication array proved instrumental in providing 60 seconds of warning to the crew in the tube between the first two cathedrals when a flash flood struck the cave, flooding this tube.
All crew members were able to safely reach pre-scouted refuge spots and shelter in place until the floodwater started to recede four hours later and evacuations could begin. The access via the Daylight Shaft proved instrumental in rescuing crew who were cut off from the other access shaft by the flood waters which prevented access that direction for 18 hours.
This illustrates how effective planning can allow for a fluid response to an emergency, leading to successful outcomes and great stories to tell.
Date: 31 October 2023
Time: 10 am -11 am
Location: Online
Join now
