The Woman Who Spun and Spun and Spun a Year Ago Today
Only months later did I learn that her face was "black from the blood vessels that broke"
After talking to my mom about the way the news covers first responders, I got to thinking about Kati Metro, the spinning helicopter lady from one year ago today. This was all pretty funny at the time, so it’s obviously time to look back and make everyone, including myself, feel bad:
On June 4, 2019, Kati Metro fell down and injured her face while hiking at Piestewa Peak in Phoenix, and became so disoriented she apparently needed to be rescued. Piestewa Peak is a pretty tough hike considering it’s entirely within the Phoenix city limits—I was a little bruised and blistered after I tackled it in 2017—so I don’t assume Kati was out of shape just because she was 74.
Kati now says that at the time, she asked not to be airlifted—presumably thinking she could simply be carried back down the mountain. Ask anyone who has ever hiked Piestewa before, and the choice to airlift her does seem a little odd. There’s a parking lot very close by, and the Metros say they were near the bottom of the mountain when Kati fell.
What happened next, according to fire officials at a press conference afterward, was called “rotor wash,” air turbulence from a helicopter that is “a lot more complicated to visualize” than jet blasts from a plane, according to Aviation Safety magazine. One way to visualize it is to look at what happened to peaceful protesters in Washington, D.C. on June 1 when a Blackhawk helicopter hovered over them:
Something in this squall interacted with the basket stretcher rescue workers were using to haul Kati up. I imagine this is a little like when you hold the corners of a business card with your thumb and middle finger and blow on it—it won’t spin perfectly unless you get the angle just right. Derek Geisel, the pilot of the helicopter, said at the press conference that the problem was with a backup line. I believe that the backup line in question is meant to be attached to a person on the ground, and that when all goes according to plan, it looks like this:
That backup failed in some way, and then later “broke,” according to Geisel, which is why the basket stretcher was able to achieve such an energetic, almost whimsical spin—175 revolutions according to The Daily Mail. If you count from one to 175 as fast as you can right now, you’ll start to feel nauseous.
Anyway, that’s my full postmortem on the botched rescue itself. Kati herself survived, but according to her husband George, speaking to The Arizona Republic, “she thought that she was going to die,” and “tried to control her breathing because she felt that she was going to pass out.” G-forces make me pass out pretty easily, so Kati must be pretty tough if she really stayed awake through all that (and who can really say for sure whether she passed out or not?). I remember taking comfort in the thought that she must have passed out.
But also, that same Republic story says Kati’s face was “black from the blood vessels that broke from the spinning, and her arms and legs were also affected by the events.” Kati had suffered an injury to her face in her initial fall. But g-forces are, of course, very nasty—for instance, Princess Diana most likely died from g-forces in the car crash that killed her, not from trauma.
But the middle of Kati’s body was itself the axis of rotation. In our usual tests of the human body’s ability to endure extreme g-forces, we usually make some object external to the body the axis of the spin, effectively just increasing gravity—like those old black-and-white images of test pilots who were riding in a “sled,” a device a little like a tilt-o-whirl at a state fair. Or there was this kid who got himself caught in a much tighter spin around a merry-go-round:
And even that kid’s face was red from his injuries—the condition is even called “redout.” Kati’s broken blood vessels supposedly turned her face black.
As you might expect, she’s now suing for $2 million. According to the full text of her claim she was in the hospital or an inpatient rehab facility for nearly a month with injuries including spinal stenosis that required surgery, and she’s still dealing with residual dizziness.
Going back to the day it happened, I’m a little ashamed of the way I reacted, and not because I was laughing at someone else’s misfortune—after all, we’ve decided that Grape Lady is funny, and she was injured pretty badly too. What bothers me is that I felt better for laughing when news reports came in claiming she was fine:
News reports from the day it happened ended by saying things like, “The woman reportedly suffered no injuries from the spinning aside from dizziness and nausea,” because of what firefighters said at their press conference. That was revealed to be bullshit two days later—though speaking for myself, I didn’t follow up at the time and look into it.
One thing I think right-thinking people have learned (or re-learned) from the present wave of protests is that the local TV news carries water for people like the police, and in the case of Kati Metro, the fire department. In other words, the news tends to the needs of institutions with public relations departments, who hold press conferences, and craft narratives about their work for public consumption.
Way back in 1999, sociologists at Western Illinois University watched a bunch of TV news and took the temperature of its coverage of the police. Here’s what that looked like:
Stories like that first one, a profile of a retired LAPD officer, sound familiar—they’re crafted by public relations departments, and designed to foster trust. I participated in this kind of circus one time when I got invited to an interactive LAPD event for journalists, designed to show that LAPD officers were being trained to de-escalate rather than just open fire (I came to no such conclusion in my coverage).
This is also true of firefighters. According to Jim Spell of a blog called Fire Rescue 1, “It is the public information officer’s job to protect firefighters and get one unified story to where it needs to be.” Public information officers (PIOs) can also, according to Spell, “be counted on to corral the press,” and “deflect questions away from working firefighters.”
Here’s TV reporter Scott Goldberg confessing to all the sins of bad TV news reporting: