4 minute read
Dacia to the Rescue 4x4 Dusters at work saving lives in Europe’s mountains
Words: Kaziyoshi Sasazaki Pictures: Jeep
If someone were to ask you to name Europe’s most popular regions for mountaineering, you’d almost certainly come back with the Alps or the Pyrenees.
You might try to be clever and say something about Scotland or the
Peak District, or maybe the Black
Forest, but the smart money is on leading with your banker.
As they might remind you on the BBC, however, other mountain ranges are available. You’ll be aware of the Tatras and the Urals, those ones in Poland and possibly something going on down the middle of Italy. But would you think about the Kamnik, Julian, Dinaric and Carpathian mountains?
These are among the ranges which every year attract thousands of visitors to the wild places of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. In Croatia alone (the only one of the three that doesn’t have a peak above 2000 metres), the total number of visits to its mountainous regions equates to 600,000 days of hiking per year.
And where you get mountaineering, you get mountain mishaps.
Still in Croatia, the nation’s peaks are watched over by a rescue association of some 700 volunteers. As an illustration of how valuable their services are, they attend 7000 callouts every year. Mostly in summer, but human error (and natural disasters) can strike all year round.
Some of these volunteers have been doing it for as long as a quarter of a century. But in 2013, they were joined by a new team member – the Dacia Duster.
Following a tie-up with Dacia, the three nations’ mountain rescue associations took delivery of around 20 Dusters each. Naturally, these are all-wheel drive models – whose tractability and ground clearance has made them an invaluable asset in the rugged terrain and harsh conditions of the mountains.
Used as rapid response vehicles, the Dusters typically carry teams of three rescuers along with all their equipment and, if necessary, search dogs to the scene of an accident. Most often, this requires specialists including mountaineering, caving, diving and rock climbing experts to reach wild, remote locations – often in the sort of harsh weather that gets people into diffi culties in the fi rst place.
In Serbia, for example, a nationwide team of around 500 volunteers is called out around 1500 times a year. This has resulted in the Dusters being used every single day for the last eight years, to tow trailers full of rescue equipment and transport rescuers and search dogs to the most remote parts of the country – something Dacia says they’ve done without ever registering a single failure.
This includes an almost literal perfect storm of winter conditions in 2014, when the vehicles had to operate over several days in fl ooded areas, facing rain, mud, snow and blizzards. In Croatia, meanwhile, some 15% of callouts are caused by natural disasters including fl oods, earthquakes and avalanches.
In December 2020, an earthquake destroyed the town of Petrinja, Croatia. Driving their Dusters, the Croatian mountain rescue teams were the fi rst on the scene. Thanks to their rapid response, they were able to save a woman trapped beneath the rubble.
‘With the Duster, we can get to the scene of the accident really
quickly to give fi rst aid,’ said Darko, a long-serving Croat rescuer. ‘They are really practical vehicles because they can be driven on urban roads and forest tracks too.’
Darko’s Slovene counterparts, who number 430, were called out to 485 incidents in 2020 alone – a fi gure that becomes even more daunting when you remember that large parts of Europe spent so much of the year in lockdown. Around a third of these incidents involved people having either got lost or become trapped. One again, the Dusters play a pivotal role in getting volunteers and their equipment to those who need them.
Of course, most of the Dusters in the UK are front-wheel drive only. However with 4x4 variants having been available since the fi rst-generation model went on sale here, it’s a vehicle that’s earned its reputation for toughness and off-road ability. And that’s no idle boast, either – just ask the guys who rely on their Dacias to help them save lives in the rugged terrain of mountain ranges you’ve never even heard of…
