Friday, Mar 31, 2006 at 07:17
Don't call the VIC Police for help out country and hope thay can find you. In January this year we stopped to help someone who had flipped their soft roader on the Jameison Eildon road blocking one lane around a blind corner. They were both OK but needed to arrange recovery of their wrecked vehicle.
No phone coverage and no-one listening on UHF so we drove into Eildon to find the coppers as it was after dark on the Sunday of a long weekend and nothing else was open. The station was vacant but there was a call box on the wall that connected us into police ops in
Melbourne.
We described the situation. First problem was that he had no idea where we were: "Is that some 4WD track?" "No. It's the main asphalt road from Eildon to Jameison." I ended up telling him to look for
Lake Eildon on his map and look below it for a road. Ah, found it!
I asked him if a position in either UTM or Lat/Long would help but he said that they were not that sophisticated yet, so we ended up giving directions like "3 km past the big river bridge heading towards Eildon."
While I might not expect all the cop cars to carry GPS/Mapping, I would have thought that Police Ops in
Melbourne could handle a UTM or DMS position, or at least take it down in case it was useful to someone.
FollowupID:
418830