At the New Zealand Search and Rescue Council Awards in Parliament at Wellington last night, LandSAR Wanaka and the Wanaka police search and rescue squad were jointly presented with the NZSAR Certificate of Achievement - for an important contribution to search and rescue.
The award recognised the organisations' efforts during ''Operation Latta'' on January 1, 2012, in which they rescued 15-year-old Dion Latta, a pupil at Dunedin's John McGlashan College, who was trapped upside down under a waterfall for about three hours in the Motatapu Gorge near Wanaka.
Although Dion was freed, he died the next morning in Dunedin Hospital.
The bravery of his rescuers was praised by Otago Southland coroner David Crerar following an inquest into the death in December 2012. Mr Crerar said at the time that in 33 years as a coroner, he had ''never read evidence quite so harrowing''.
LandSAR Wanaka chairman Roy Bailey and Wanaka police search and rescue-co-ordinator Sergeant Aaron Nicholson accepted the award in Wellington on behalf of the two organisations.
''Most of the time we either save someone or we can't do anything to affect the result because they've already died,'' Sgt Nicholson told the Otago Daily Times.
''[Operation Latta] is particularly unfortunate, because we managed to save someone from a very tricky spot and then we lost them. For the amount of time and effort and the emotional work that went in to that ... it was quite a relief thinking that we'd done the job, then to find out he'd died, it was quite hard on a lot of people.''
Mr Bailey was overseas at the time of the accident so was not directly involved, but was aware of its lasting effects on those who were - about 10 people in the field and a four-strong management team - which made the award particularly significant.
''It's always nice to be recognised for what you've done, especially something like the Latta Operation that had quite an impact on quite a few ... of the volunteers.''
LandSAR Wanaka has twice won the LandSAR New Zealand Supreme Award, for a canyon rescue near Makarora in 2011, and in 2009 for locating and retrieving the body of Haast helicopter pilot Morgan Saxton from Lake Wanaka.
The main NZSAR Gold Award - for the ''most significant'' contribution to search and rescue during 2012, went to Alan Deal, Andrew Cronin, Jayden Strickland and Phil Dwyer, of the Taranaki Rescue Helicopter Trust, for outstanding efforts during the Paritutu Rock incident in New Plymouth, on August 8, which ended in the deaths of two high school pupils and a rock-climbing instructor.
