Yesterday at training, we had a really interesting day. Heath decided to “expand our comfort zones” and sent us out on a litter-carry to start. Then we worked area problems. BB had a nice sector up part of the Sugarloaf Mountain range. We worked for a couple hours while I became increasingly worried since I had no solid alerts other than a couple of headlifts. It turned out the subject was not in our sector. On our last pass, he hit a track really hard taking us into the next sector. Having lost it at the cliff face, we climbed to the top of the hill back toward our sector… where we ran into our subject.
Heath had all sorts of great exercise inputs. When we got to our sector, we were directed that solar flares had knocked out all of our GPS devices (Drat that Heath!). 10 minutes later, our batteries died, unless we had spare batteries. Also, Cindy’s compass was non-functional, unless she had another. We sent proof back to base via a camera cellphone.
After finding Tricia a couple hours later, we were told she had a knee and ankle injury, storms were coming, and we had to hunker down in a shelter to wait for ground crews. Then we were directed to take a written test to include showing fire-starting materials and kindling, as well as some knots. I sent back pictures to base. We cleverly used our written tests as kindling and showed some great knots using Tricia’s handy knot reference. This pleased us all immensely.
After heading back to base, we worked other dogs. It’s great when one dog gets a long problem, but that generally means others do not.
Pictures were geo-referenced using a cool little Sony GPS-CS1 that allowed me to geo-reference photos from both my Nikon and cellphone cameras after returning home.
Below is a Flickr map showing photos from our journey.
Of of the niggly things about SAR management is the excessive use of forms. And, of course, everything is paper-based. A better way to manage paperwork is digitally. Users continue to use their standard workflow of paper management, but also keep a digital copy to share and distribute. Down with carbon copies!
Here’s the basic workflow. The search area is divided into areas. In the map below, the search area size is somewhat determined by the resource (e.g., K9 teams) and also topography. We try to draw up sectors that have easily identifiable boundaries by teams in the field.
Search areas are ranked by each member of the management team in terms of likelihood that the missing person could be in each particular area. Scores are averaged and sectors prioritized. For the sectors with the highest likelihood, the search management teams assigns first and also looks for a higher probability of detection from the assigned team.
Finally, task assignment forms (TAFs) are written up and sector maps attached to the forms. There are two copies of these forms, so it is common to use carbon paper. One copy is retained by search management when the task is assigned to a search team. The other copy goes to the search team.
Here’s a movie demonstrating how task assignment forms are stapled together so that it easy to tear apart the two copies. It’s an arcane art. (And… yes…. you need two staples.)
Xpaper is a product SAR managers can use to make it easier to store and distribute paper-based search management products such as Task Assignment Forms. Using a Logitech digital io2 pen, users write on standard forms. These forms should have been previously printed on a standard printer, but the paper is special xpaper. Xpaper costs about $15 for 100 sheets. So the cost is probably not much worse than carbon copy forms. Once the pen is docked in the computer, a digital copy of the form and the printed ink is saved as a .pdf file. Potentially, all paper products from a search could be stored electronically in this manner. So, hand em out as usual, but use only one copy and give that one to the searcher. The search manager should retain the pdf version and be able to organize it easily on a laptop, and hand over digital materials to incoming management teams or responsible authority.