Cyberspace Snow and Avalanche Center Update http://www.csac.org December 29, 1996 We hope that all of you have had a safe and enjoyable holiday season so far, and that you all have a great new year. Here is a summary of some recent changes to the Internet avalanche center and some things we hope to have soon. Incidents: Unfortunately not everyone has had a safe holiday season. The incidents page has grown rapidly and now has 13 reports. Many of these have been brought to our attention by frequent visitors to our site or submitted directly to us via our online form. Thanks to those who have contributed information! So far there have been 4 fatalities in the US and 4 in Canada - not a good start to the season. You can compare this to last year on the web site. All four of the US fatalities occurred during avalanche warnings. (The reports for ll four are linked to the archived bulletin for the day on which they occurred, so you can check this out. Three were wearing beacons - remember that just wearing one will not save you. (It has helped the recoveries of the bodies, though.) FWIW, two were climbers (WA), one was a snowmobiler(UT), and one was a snowboarder(UT). There is also an interesting news story of a highway accident near Jackson WY (submitted to us by the author) and several incidents from California in the wake of massive snowfall there. Professional Resources: We have added a liability ad lawsuit section, in reponse to some interest in this topic following the Heli-skiing accident near Whistler BC. Right now this page has a link to our html version of a court decision recently announced in BC concerning a past heli-skiing lawsuit. (This is the "Baystreet" decision, and was in favor of CMH and the guide.) We also have two new papers online in html - both by Karl Birkeland, Ron Johnson, and colleagues in the Bozeman area. One is on the stuffblock stability test and the other is on Near Surface Faceting. These are linked into the Research page. Education: The only new thing here is our danger scale page where you can find copies of the danger scales in use in the US, Canada, and Europe as well as links to other versions of these scales. We are working on some additional material for the education section, and will probably reorganize it soon. Bulletins: Bulletins are all working smoothly now, including email distribution lists. We distribute various bulletins directly by email to well over 600 email adresses now. We will be cleaning up the appearance of various bulletin pages, including better organizing links to related items. Some of the archiving still needs some work. Other Info Section: Our links page is overdue for some work - it should have more links and be better orgnized over the next couple days. Miscellaneous Improvements: We have recently checked the home page and the incidents page for lynx (text only) compatibility ad corrected any problems. (Especially the main incidents page, which relies heavily on the table format.) We are also adding a short java-script tag showing the last modified time to the bottom of many of our pages. So if you have a newer browser you will be able to see if the page has changed recently. Various other small things have been done to clean up the html, based on review with lynx and on detailed review of the log files. We hope you find our site informative and beneficial, and that you will visit it often. It is updated almost daily (even aside from bulletins which are automatically updated). Jim *********************************************************** Cyberspace Snow and Avalanche Center (CSAC) 1034 NW 34th St, Corvallis OR 97330 (541)754-8353 (541)461-4279 Fax http://www.csac.org snow@csac.org Jim Frankenfield; Director ***********************************************************