Rescue on the rocks of Catalina

As they walked up the hill overlooking the ocean, the Topanga couple only wanted to test the ham radios they’d been trained to use in a disaster.

Instead, Karl Tso and Deborah Ava ran into a real-life emergency on Catalina. Their quick work one night late last month helped save the life of a man who was half-conscious and bleeding at the rocky bottom of a 35-foot cliff.

By spotting the man and rushing to alert authorities, Tso and Ava set in motion a rescue operation that included the county’s Baywatch paramedics and an airlift to a mainland hospital in a county Fire Department helicopter. At a board meeting early next month, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky will be presenting Tso and Ava with a commendation. “Karl Tso and Deborah Ava exemplify how dedicated volunteers can empower themselves to help others in times of emergency, and even save lives,” the supervisor said in his citation.

Tso and Ava had traveled to the Camp Emerald Bay Boy Scout camp for an overnight trip with their two Cub Scout sons on October 23. At 9:30 p.m., as their boys played with counselors and fellow scouts, the couple took a walk up a hillside above Doctor’s Cove. It was high enough, Tso figured, to test out the two-way radios on which they’d been trained to coordinate community disaster efforts with the volunteer Topanga Coalition for Emergency Preparedness. The ham, or amateur, radio operators can continue to keep neighbors informed and connected even when cell and other phone services go down. “In a disaster, that’s critical,” notes Tso, who obtained his ham license last spring.

Part way up the hill, Ava says she heard an “eerie moaning sound” below. Tso shined a powerful police flashlight along the water’s edge, where he saw the injured man sprawled across the jagged boulders.

He’d evidently slipped from the same trail they were on. “The way he was laying there, I thought he’d broken his spine,” Tso says. Tso and Ava yelled to him. “We couldn’t tell whether he could hear us at all,” Tso recalls.

The couple ran back down the trail and alerted counselors to phone 911. Then they returned to the vantage point above the man, later identified as Peter Conn, 59, who’d also come to Emerald Bay with his son for the Cub Scout weekend.

Counselors and parents came to assist, but for a time it was unclear to Tso whether the 911 call was successful. So, using his ham radio, Tso sent out an emergency message for anyone on the mainland, more than 20 miles away. He reached L.A. Sheriff’s Sergeant Scott Bastian, a ham radio enthusiast who was driving home to Fullerton after finishing his shift at the Men’s Central Jail in downtown L.A. Bastian quickly phoned the Sheriff’s Radio Center and confirmed for Tso that “Baywatch as well as Sheriff’s Rescue was on the way.”

When the Baywatch boat arrived, paramedic Joel Gitelson swam ashore and, with the help of camp counselors who’d made their way to the injured man, immobilized Conn on a “back board” to prevent further injury. Gitelson then rowed Conn from the beach to the waiting rescue boat, Isthmus, in a borrowed skiff.

On the cliff above, Tso was happy to hear Conn complain to paramedics that his leg hurt “because that meant he hadn’t severed his spine,” Tso recalled. The Isthmus took Conn to a shore-side heliport where a chopper crew airlifted him to St. Mary’s Hospital in Long Beach.

Conn sustained a broken jaw and had swallowed teeth jarred loose in the fall. He also suffered multiple fractures of a hand, leg and hip. Last week, Conn was moved to a hospital closer to home, where he’s “making progress,” says Gail Conn, his wife and business partner in an interactive market-research firm.

The family is grateful for Tso’s and Ava’s quick thinking. “We owe them everything,” says Gail Conn, who says her husband could well have bled to death had he not been rescued quickly. “He was very lucky to be found when he was.”

For their part, Tso, who designs and builds homes, and Ava, a packaging designer at Mattel, found the experience a little “surreal.” But as Ava says, “It was thrilling that we were able to help the man.” In fact, they’d attended a disaster radio training session just two days before the outing. “It’s so ironic that we’d just been to the class,” Ava laughed. “And, then, boom, it all just worked.”