personal LED lighting for water rescue in SE Texas

Of course everyone wants the people hurt by horrific storm harvey to be safe and fully recover from this tragic event.
After watching the neighborhood residential water rescues it occurred to me that (at night) a visible LED flashlight set on STROBE OR SOS might help responders identify and rescue trapped people from homes. many of us here at CPF have viewed some of these features like SOS as an unnecessary hassle while cycling through modes. a 12 to 36 hour strobe or SOS LED light could be a lifesaver. I can not think of a better time to own a working LED flashlight. any lights that flash a color combo of red and or blue could be a help as well. I am sure a working LED flashlight has already saved lives there.

I have a first-light Le t max but they do a tomahawk and a torq which are less expensive. HDS makes a good light that is pragrammable but it's not cheap. The other ones I know of are among but not limited to acr artex strobes with the latter being limited to a survival strobe or marker light.. which is fairly reasonable.

While none of us want to think about being in such situations we have to be realistic and likewise think "how much is my life worth?"
This is where buying a good brand that is well known comes in rather than thinking about saving dollars!

I've always been a fan of hard-to-activate-accidentally strobes or SOS. Finding people can go from days to minutes given 10 lumens of SOS-strobe on a moonless night, if you're lost in the mountains.
I'd stay away from red or blue though. Worst case rescuers would drop you thinking you already have help.

terjee said:

I've always been a fan of hard-to-activate-accidentally strobes or SOS. Finding people can go from days to minutes given 10 lumens of SOS-strobe on a moonless night, if you're lost in the mountains.
I'd stay away from red or blue though. Worst case rescuers would drop you thinking you already have help.

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Good Point! On that note, I think most lights with the strobe function at a cost "most" consider affordable will only have the white light for the strobe... I "think."

terjee said:

I've always been a fan of hard-to-activate-accidentally strobes or SOS. Finding people can go from days to minutes given 10 lumens of SOS-strobe on a moonless night, if you're lost in the mountains.
I'd stay away from red or blue though. Worst case rescuers would drop you thinking you already have help.

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That's why I like how Nitecore does it. They have included strobe in almost all their lights except a few mainly designed for keychain style EDC carry. And they have put the strobe, as well as the SOS and beacon, 'off to the side' so to speak. It takes deliberate intent to activate any of those three so they are out of the way for normal every day operation, yet quickly accessible if/when needed. That's one of the reasons why their EA11 is my 'big' EDC. [I also carry a Microstream and a TIP or Tube] If I wasn't carrying that I would seriously consider carrying the P30. It isn't that much bigger, except for the head, and would be adequate for almost any emergency situation.

Keep in mind that most people, while they know what SOS means, don't know how to read it if they see it. I think just the fact of a flashing light in a regular pattern would bring about the same result. Its big advantage over the beacon feature is that while it is regular and repeating, it would be hard to mistake it for any sort of marker light like something on a tower, rather than a locator for someone who needs help.

I like the newer Zebralight interface with hidden flash modes. Interestingly they didn't include an SOS mode at all, and with ZL click press interface it would be pretty difficult to do any Morse code signaling with their lights. - though you could do slow, clear Morse with high mode.

I hadn't considered that a beacon mode might be confused with some navigation light in an emergency, and maybe that's an issue, but ZL's high power beacon mode seems like it would be very good for marking your location and getting attention during a prolonged emergency. High power flash of about 1/10 second every 5 seconds should last more than a day and night, maybe 48 hours even.
Also once you're in the flash modes (3 clicks from off),and on high beacon mode, two clicks switches to a rapid high on/off cycle, two more clicks activates strobe.
With that order you could leave the high beacon running while waiting for help and quickly switch to the more insistent attention grabbing flash modes of you saw rescue that didn't seem to have registered your signal.

Not necessarily a problem that most people don't know morse code. Most rescuers would, and a surprising amount of people will recognize SOS, even if they don't know it in general. For those that can't decode even SOS, it's still visibly quite different from both random, and also fixed strobe or similar. You'd still get the "someone is trying to signal something"-feel. Nokia phones used to signal SMS with morse code when you got an SMS, and with SMS and SOS being just one long dash apart, that's something as well.
Although I've never had a Nitecore above keychain size, it sounds like they got it right.

I think it's more important to have strobe than SOS btw. If people are looking for you, marking your location is what matters most. The addition of SOS I suppose matters most if you're trying to call for attention from people not really looking, but would they actually call it in or to look just by that signal alone? Probably some, but probably few.

If mountain-hiking solo, it could make sense to bring at least one light with SOS, but other than that, strobe would probably do fine.

In a disaster situation, a slow strobe would probably be just as effective as a fast one but would also prolong battery life.