Global Rescue offers emergency evacuations for security threats
Posted by Global Administrator on Thu, Apr 02, 2009 @ 06:25 PM
A tourist and a toddler walk past a bombed store in Dahab (AP)
In
2007, for the third straight year, Egypt was ranked the number-one
adventure travel destination, thanks in part to blood-pumping Jeep
rides through the Sinai Desert and the underwater thrills of the Red
Sea in Sharm el-Sheikh.
Unfortunately for tourists,
though, some of the most hair-raising experiences in Egypt are not
meant to thrill, but to terrorize.
Ten years ago, 62
tourists and tour guides were massacred at the Temple of Hatshepsut, in
Luxor. In 2004, bomb attacks on hotels in the Sinai killed 34. The
following year, blasts in downtown Sharm accounted for the deadliest
attack in the country’s history, killing 85. Two dozen others were
slaughtered in 2006 in the Red Sea resort of Dahab.
The rising
bloodshed has prompted emergency evacuation company Global Rescue to
offer some peace of mind when their members travel to Egypt and other
countries where terrorist attacks are a perennial risk. Any time its
Security Services members find themselves in imminent danger, Global
Rescue will come to extract them from the situation and escort them to
safety.
Previously, the company focused its efforts on medical
evacuations alone. In the past five years, it had evacuated ailing
severely frostbitten hikers from the Himalaya, severely ill students
from West Africa, aided a hunter who had lost his vital medication in
the remote Yukon, and responded to hundreds of other medical
emergencies around the world.
More
recently, the calls for help started to take on a different tone: An
elderly woman at risk of being trapped by Russian bombs in the capital
of the Georgian Republic. American executives isolated in towns
throughout Lebanon during the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. Businessmen
in Chad stuck in a hotel in the capital, N'Djamena, as rebels bore down
on the city.
Global Rescue fielded those calls and
solved those problems for its corporate clients in the past, and now is
prepared to extend those services to all of its members.