Australian police and rescue authorities have urged people to register their rescue beacons after they raced to the site of a distress signal only to find it had been set off by a hungry cow.
Police were quickly sent to the remote Northern Territory location 115km south of Darwin, but they and cattle station staff “found themselves in a paddock with nothing around but grazing cattle,” duty superintendent Louise Jorgensen said of Saturday’s incident.
Only when it grew dark did one of the party near the town of Adelaide River notice the flashing light of the beacon, which – it was soon revealed – had been activated by a cow trampling and then trying to eat it.
The beacon was not registered but investigators found the owner to be a helicopter company based in Katherine, 200km away, which said it had fallen out of one of its helicopters during a cattle muster.
While owners are required under maritime and aviation law to register their beacons if conducting activities on water or in the air, it is only a recommendation for general users.
There is no financial penalty for failing to register a beacon or for inadvertently setting one off, but duty superintendent Brendan Muldoon told Guardian Australia it was still “poor form”.
“Two members from Adelaide River were called out, they were both off duty so had to be called out to do it,” Muldoon said. “I think it’s just poor form as opposed to a criminal offence, because it does waste resources. When we get a call we do throw everything at it.”
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is based in Canberra and received the alert, said: “In this case, a simple phone call to the registered owner could have indicated that the situation was not of real distress.
“Therefore it is always important to remember that whether you have two legs or four, a properly registered, GPS enabled distress beacon can mean all the difference in a life-threatening situation.”
Discarded beacons going off and alerting rescue teams was an ongoing issue, Muldoon said, particularly after the entire system moved to a different wavelength in 2009.
“When they changed the Epirbs [emergency position indicating radio beacons] from 121.5Mhz to the 406Mhz we have a lot of Epirbs going off in tips around the country because people threw them away – especially when it rained,” he said.
“We still have to go out and recover it because it will continue to go off.”
Muldoon urged beacon owners to register their devices so at least search and rescue workers know who they are looking for, or can call to check it has not been activated by accident, or by a hungry cow.
