Discussion: Search and rescue plans

Hello all. I direct meets, set courses, etc. with New Mexico Orienteers. I also help to run large long distance endurance races, usually as a radio operator, and I am a member of our state Search and Rescue volunteer service. For NM SAR one of my jobs is to write plans on the fly, in the course of a mission. Having searched AttackPoint for old threads about SAR, I have some comments that may be helpful.

There are many low-cost training courses and books on managing SAR missions. Here in New Mexico we have a short, concise book (PDF) anyone can download for free that covers the basics of SAR as practiced in New Mexico: Field Certification Study Guide.

The time to get to know your area SAR managers is not in the midst of a SAR mission emerging from one of your meets. Do that now.

SAR responders vary greatly in skill and experience. The tendency to fixate on one scenario (eg, hurt rather than lost) and ignore others is a common fault. Plan for it.

For locations where SAR calls are frequent, good SAR managers will write plans in advance. Writing good plans is an art, one that some SAR managers do better than others. I am still learning how to do it myself. There are helpful forms for this, most based on the Incident Command System (ICS).

A medical plan would include such details as the name, location, telephone number, and level of service of local urgent care clinics and hospitals. Also, similar details for ground and air ambulance companies. You as an orienteering meet director don't need all that detail (your plan includes calling 911) but I have found it helpful to have on hand directions to the nearest urgent care clinic and hospital, nearest place to get a hot shower or hot food, nearest veterinary clinic, nearest tow service, etc. Also, numbers to call for different emergency services. In most of the United States to get SAR you call the county sheriff or the park ranger; in New Mexico with some exceptions you have to go through the State Police. Sometimes 911 dispatch does not see that you need to be put through to the State Police so it helps to call directly rather than use 911.

I have called 911 for an overdue orienteer. The better the orienteer, the sooner that call should be made, because it is less likely they are lost and more likely they are experiencing a medical emergency. It is better to get help sooner than later. Initial help may be no more than guidance over the phone and maybe having dispatch try extracting GPS coordinates from the overdue person's cell phone. Your meet registration form should ask if the orienteer is carrying a cell phone and if yes what is its number? For each map location you should have in your meet kit a set of area topo maps and any other relevant maps. You want those maps for coordinates, for road access points, and for names of trails, streams, hills, and other features. It can help also to maintain a list of the names and phone numbers of adjacent property owners, relevant park rangers, etc. My meet kits include a local phone book.

All SAR search tasks can be grouped into a small set of strategies: mostly investigation, containment, search. Cruising trails and roads in the area is hasty searching. Finding out if the person's car is still in the parking lot is investigation. Parking a reliable person to watch at a key point is containment. One key point is the overdue person's car. Any task you do for more than one overdue orienteer you may as well write up as a Task Assignment (ICS form 204) to include in future meet kit emergency plans. One task assignment is to finish the meet and decide who you want to stay and help and who should go home.

Apart from search, SAR objectives are either rescue or recovery (of a body). Recovery is strictly a job for the authorities. Rescue usually is going to be far beyond your abilities, except as manpower to help carry a litter. Nonetheless, you can plan ahead for both rescues and recoveries. Write a plan about when, how, and by whom the family should be alerted. Write a plan for body recovery that includes calling a trained person (clergy?) to come provide grief support and to check if anyone involved needs critical incident stress debriefing.

I have a cache of small 2-way radios but I would not want to rely on them during a search. Their range is limited, and under stress people often are not competent to operate unfamiliar equipment. Instead, I like to collect cell phone numbers of my meet staff. I also like to know who is an amateur radio operator, and if they have a radio installed in their vehicle at the meet.

Anything else?

I should add that as meet director you must ensure that a SAR mission gets going ASAP, but at the same time you cannot abandon the meet. The meet staff must continue to look out for everyone who is out in the woods, and you must keep track of all staff and keep them on task. In the middle of an emergency this can be a very hard thing to do. Some people will want to drop everything and rush off into the woods to search. They have good intentions, but often this behavior does more harm than good.

Thank you for writing this down. Our club is also updating its emergency procedures.

Here's a link to the New Mexico Search and Rescue (SAR) Field Certification Study Guide
http://nmsarc.org/resources/certification.html

There are some aspects of an orienteering meet that are different from other field events.

Everyone registers at every meet. Many meet registration/waiver forms ask for information on-site that can be very helpful in a SAR mission:

1. make, model, color, plate number of vehicle you came in
1a. if you leave your keys at registration, this can be noted on the form
2. name of person driving and/or group leader
3. if you plan to carry a cell phone with you, and its number

#3 is increasingly valuable information now because of E911. Most cell phones now come with GPS chips. Where extended 911 (E911) has been enabled, a dispatcher can page a cell phone and pull its coordinates. Elsewhere, you can call the number to ask the orienteer if they need help. If the phone is turned off or in a cell blind spot, you can leave a brief voicemail asking the orienteer to check in with you or call 911. Text messages often get through where the cell signal is too poor for voice, so try sending a text message.

You can pre-plan task assignments for "orienteer down": hasty search on the course, checking all reasonable routes on each leg. Hasty search a short course in reverse, and a long course from both ends. Or partition the course into parts. Recall that urgent and important are orthogonal, and put a high priority on hasty search of hazard areas: cliffs, stream banks, and mine shafts near the course.

You can also pre-plan task assignments for "orienteer lost": orienteers get lost most often when they make parallel errors, 180 degree errors, or run off the map. Examine the course map for risk of each type of error, and plan accordingly.

One important search task is containment. Containment can be pre-planned just once for the entire orienteering map, and will apply to any search on that map for decades to come. Another pre-planned task is to assign people to keep watch on the safety bearing. This often means simply driving slowly up and down a road, looking and listening for clues (the person, a voice, a whistle, clothing or gear on the ground, footprints, etc). Look for clues on both sides of the road.

Consider inviting your local SAR to hold a training ("mock") mission during one of your meets, or to set up a dummy "lost orienteer" scenario just for them. If your local SAR has trained search dogs, learn a little about protecting scent articles. This often means keeping all people out of and away from the vehicle (refer to #1 and #1a above). If your local SAR has trackers, find the person's friends at the meet and ask them to describe the kind of shoe the person is wearing and if the person uses 1 or 2 hiking poles.

Anecdotal evidence shows that the most effective method of finding a seriously lost orienteer is to drive the perimeter roads of the map (if there are any) and pick them up. In one case I know of, the lost orienteer had already procured ice cream.

Yup, happens a lot in SAR too.

Several O-USA members just received Basic Search certification this past weekend from National Park Service Instructor Dan Pontbriand. One anticipated outcome is that we'll devise a model O-USA SAR plan which clubs will be able to use as a framework for their own plans. Thanks to Chuck Ferguson for organizing this training opportunity for O-USA members. I expect he will have more comments here shortly.

Thanks, Mike and thank you Una for an excellent start to SAR awareness among orienteers. The BSAR course above came about after the frustration among FLO orienteers at not being allowed to join the search in two missing person instances, despite FLO's success in finding one of the people after the first search officially ended. Chief Ranger Dan Pontbriand told us why we may not be welcomed, and Una told us what to do about it.

What to do? As Una writes: "The time to get to know your area SAR managers is now, not in the midst of a search mission. I'd add that in addition if you want to help, when you meet the area SAR manager(s), bring something to the table and "I know how to read a map very well," is not enough.

Why aren't you welcomed? They don't know you! As Dan pointed out, it is important to finding the missing person that you protect the clues (do no harm) and without documented training and experience, you won't know now to do this, and you will NOT be accepted in most searches--and you should not be. A quick example, I go missing on a green course and you find my hat, pick it up and run excitedly back to the start (since no one thought to supply radios, or to get every search member's cell number). You have just destroyed the location of that clue if you did not mark it with tape, and on your GPS or map, and you have ruined the scent for the search dog if one is used. Common sense, yes, but good to think about in advance and to go out and practice.

For purposes of this attackpoint discussion, there are two kinds of Searches (Rescue is pretty much situational and best left to the professionals as Una notes). The two are orienteering searches, which our class of ten hopes to improve, and all other SARs which you may, at your own expense, wish to join---and if you can orienteer (on a 1:24,000 map), you have excellent talent to offer and build upon.

Before we search, we have to have someone who is lost. The definition of "lost" has two parts. First, you don't know where you are (which is often not a problem) and, second, you do not know how to recover to a place where you will know where you are, which is a problem. Experienced orienteers are rarely bothered by the first except as it messes up their competitive time, and can usually recover so we are rarely, truly, "lost." This is why, Una's decision to look for an overdue, but competent orienteer, early is so spot-on.

In an ideal orienteering world, every person tasked at any O meet with the SAR responsibility will have at least studied the Incident Command System (FEMA's course 100, and will have thought about how it might apply to an O search--you get your first documented certification by passing the course test), will have written a meet SAR plan according to the guidelines of the Sample SAR Plan on the USA Orienteering website, and will have extended that planning to include who of the meet staff and the attending orienteers you want to help with the search, and you will know immediately where the registration information is located for access to personal information, car identification, friends, etc. of the missing orienteer. As Una noted, it would be a big help to have a 1:24,000 map of the area in case you have to call in the local SAR people--and you should know how to reach them (the sheriff, the state police, the park rangers--who has the responsibility at your meet location?), and how quickly to call them (and parents, etc). Una's thought to call early if a competent orienteer is missing is something I had not considered and darned good advice.

Would not hurt to read "Lost Person Behavior" by Dr. Kenneth Hill or the larger book with the same title by Robert J. Koester.

In a more perfect world, you would also know about containment, and the difference between a "Hasty" search, a type one or type two search and a grid search. As Una wrote, most meets do a hasty search of roads and trails--and that may suffice. Also most meets use what I call "passive" containment where the meet instructions advise you not to cross, for example, any paved roads (but the kid in Texas did anyway) so passive containment is only as good as the missing person's behavior. Active containment is placing people at decision points such as road or trail junctions, (and the person's car), that lead away from the orienteering area (we'd have found our missing freshman orienteer in Hoosier National Forest much earlier if we could have reached the trail junctions ahead of her) and personal containment (sit down on any trail or road you cross and we'll come find you--despite being told this, the same person, a dedicated runner, kept going. She was found by the sheriff's ATV crew about 8 miles from the finish, asleep in the middle of a trail). Well, I guess she finally did sit down after she exhausted herself. Fortunately, the orienteering training organizer knew to call the sheriff, and he called early; also, he had the contact information for her parents.

Some parting thoughts: The 11 orienteers who have passed the National Park Service's Basic SAR course have agreed to try to improve the sample plan which is on our website (and which is a good plan already). Clubs ought to poll their members and find someone interested in SAR who is willing to learn as much as possible and then share it. For liaison purposes, it will greatly help if you have a credentialed crew of orienteers that train together, but if it's only one person, that's better than what we usually have. Consider roles: Two of the members of our class never plan to actively engage in a search, but they will be invaluable in helping with the organization of any orienteering search. Final though: search skills, like orienteering skills, deteriorate without frequent use, so once you acquire SAR knowledge, go train. You can't read a book on orienteering and immediately join the elite, nor can you simply study the New Mexico Field Certification Guide for SAR---by the way, it looks to be very good. We all had our eyes opened at how hard it is to manage a line of people in a simple grid search when we actually had to do one. It was also surprising how far the sound of a whistle carries, and with practice the whole line blew at the same time, and then stopped walking (leaves are noisy!) and listened at the same time. Common sense? Yes, but takes practice.

By the way, Dan is open to teaching another three day class elsewhere in the country (west coast?) in the spring or next fall. He asks only that his travel and lodging be covered. I am his contact point, but would like for you to have 10 or more committed people before I contact him.

I hope Una will continue to monitor any additional SAR discussion. He sounds like an expert and I'm an inexperienced teaching assistant for the BSAR course.

Does O-USA have an incident reporting system of any kind? That would be my first step at a national level, to find out what kinds of incidents are most common and most serious, and focus planning efforts on dealing with those first.

In my club, overdue orienteers most often have run off the map, or have been distracted by something so interesting they forget the competition. Running off the map is something you can predict from looking at the map. Every meet SAR kit should have a plan item that reminds you to consider the likelihood of this. Distraction is more likely to occur with juniors and with some people more than others. I am not very competitive and I do stop to watch any unusual wildlife. I don't see any way to plan for this; it falls in the realm of nothing wrong, person merely overdue.

Beginners without adequate preparation often do get disoriented and run off the course but stay on trails or other handrails. We very carefully design courses so that when this happens we can "catch" the beginners. I also keep a close watch on their time on course. For a White or short Yellow course I allow ~90 minutes before I send someone out to look for them. A competent orienteer can run one of these courses in ~20 minutes or less.

As an event volunteer charged with providing SAR support in the event of trouble, I have had the extremely frustrating experience of standing around for hours beyond the set deadline waiting for the event director (not just at O meets) to declare it is time to search. Meanwhile the director is working hard at assuming the overdue person is okay, and spending a lot of time and energy on anger and avoidance rather than on appropriate action. This is bad practice for several reasons. If the overdue person is not okay, every minute counts. If the person is okay, then waiting and doing nothing teaches them that being overdue is no big deal.

If you as meet director want orienteering competitors to respect the deadline, you should actually start a search promptly (as in, within minutes) for those who miss the deadline. Not starting a search shows the competitors and meet staff too that *you* lack respect for the deadline and regard for the competitor's safety.

Starting a search is not a big deal. At first, it is little more than a decision you make: "okay, time to think SAR." Then you start acting SAR. One of your first acts should be to check the sign-in sheet to see if the overdue orienteer has a cell phone on their person, and locate their vehicle and anyone else who came with them. Program the cell phone number and the orienteer's name into your cell phone.

Now send a competent orienteer with a cell phone to hasty search the course in the reverse direction. Get that person's cell number, and take the time to program it with their name into your cell phone. Next, send a second competent orienteer to hasty search the course in the forward direction.

For score-O and rogaine formats, initial search tactics necessarily are different because there is no set course. For those formats, focus first on investigation. Start questioning other competitors: Did you see X? When? Where? What was X wearing? What was X carrying? (Avoid leading questions such as did X have water?) Keep written notes.

Ideally, you have prepared your searchers in advance. When I am meet director and my staff are temporarily idle, I often discuss with them "what if". This paid off when I actually did start a search; I was running through my mental checklist of SAR tasks to pick the most urgent and important, and thinking who to give them to, when one of my meet staff said "hey, how about I go out to that high point right now to see if I can spot them?" Perfect! All I had to say was "yes, go!" No long instructions, no explanation of why to do that.

Don't forget to call for help. Standard first aid protocol is 1st look to your own safety, 2nd call for help, 3rd do what you can to help. Calling for SAR resources should be among the first things you do. Calling for help does not produce 100's of SAR responders and helicopters and TV station vans. That comes only later, and only if the situation is serious.

At every orienteering meet you have an opportunity to do some training for SAR. Use those opportunities to practice small components of a SAR mission yourself and train your staff. That way, when you need to search for real you will know what to do and feel comfortable doing it.

Stay safe.

(I am female.)

In the SAR world I am not an expert. I have participated in only about 20 SAR missions since 1983, the majority in New Mexico in the past decade. In a decade many SAR responders will participate in hundreds of searches. However, I also have experience working in wilderness for months at a time, and as a leader of groups on wilderness experiential education trips similar to NOLS and the High Adventure programs for very advanced Boy Scouts. As an Incident Command System Planning Section Chief I am qualified to help direct a SAR mission, but not to direct one myself.

I am not comfortable with the premise that someone who has merely attended a basic SAR course to prepare them to be a SAR field team member is qualified to write a club SAR plan. Who would be qualified? Someone who has attended a National SAR School. This is a week-long curriculum developed by the US Coast Guard specifically for training SAR mission managers. These schools are free; you just have to get there, and you need enough SAR-relevant background to qualify for admission.

If no one in your club is into SAR, your best bet may be to approach your local SAR managers and ask them to work with you to write SAR plans for your club. You will need similar but separate plans for every map area you orienteer in.

Robert Koester's book "Lost Person Behavior" is required reading for the SAR manager. For orienteering club meet directors, however, the largest unmet need I see is in what to do first, what are the most important initial steps of any SAR mission. For that, I recommend Donald Cooper's book "Fundamentals of search and rescue".

Your club does not need to import a trainer from across the continent to teach basic SAR. There are well qualified instructors in every US state, usually connected with a state agency having jurisdiction (AHJ) for SAR, or a state association of volunteer SAR responders. I maintain a public list of mounted (horseback) SAR units worldwide. Wherever I know a state AHJ or association for SAR exists, I provide a link to it in my list: http://www.ibiblio.org/msar/units/

Where is this sample SAR plan for clubs?

The only club safety plan I found on the web is this:
http://home.comcast.net/~rshannonhouse/SafetyPlan....

Prompted by an ultimately successful but less than impressive SAR experience earlier this year, as well as a SAR course that Chuck convinced me to take several years ago, I've been encouraging Chuck to help prepare a basic SAR protocol addressing the overdue runner situation for club use, and as Mike Minium and Chuck have already implied earlier in this thread, hopefully it will be one outcome of the last weekend's SAR workshop.

In terms of technology, don't overlook using epunch boxes to determine which box the overdue runner last visited, as well as to learn which other runners may have seen the missing runner and might have insight into the missing person's state of mind or physical condition. Of course, telling people about safety bearings and checking to see if whistles are carried are also (low tech) steps to take. When phone coverage is available, participants can be told what # to call if they need help in a non-emergency situation (i.e. the Meet Director or a club point of contact) versus in an emergency (i.e. 911), and these numbers can be printed on the maps used for the event.

In terms of things a club can do first, agreeing on a deadline time to call 911 if the overdue runner hasn't been located by club efforts is essential. That time can depend on a variety of factors (weather, who the runner is, terrain conditions, proximity and availability of SAR personnel, etc) but it should be set and adhered to.

Last, although I think we tend to associate "boilerplate" Safety Plans with A-Meets (due to the sanctioning requirement), the majority of overdue runner situations arise at local meets. That's why we need reasonable guidelines that the average club - and the average Meet Director, who might never have directed any meet before, let alone given a thought to SAR, can use.

It is a pet peeve among SAR managers that most reporting parties wait too long before calling. Waiting works only if nothing is really wrong. Experienced SAR managers generally feel it is responsible for the reporting party to spend no more than an hour of concerted effort looking for the person before calling 911. So a minimal responsible search plan for the local meet director would be very simple:

1. Include in the meet director kit an emergency packet for that O map: relevant topo(s); local phone book; phone numbers of relevant authorities: sheriff, forest or park ranger.

2. Set a deadline for all orienteers to finish. The shorter the day length, and the more remote and inaccessible the map area is, the earlier the deadline should be.

3. Require start and finish staff to work together to keep an accurate tally of who is still out so that at the deadline, staff can say at once that everyone has finished, or who is still out.

4. If anyone is still out, use all available orienteers to start the initial search tasks immediately: investigation, confinement, hasty search.

5. One hour later, if search not resolved call 911.

That's the basics. I personally would probably also:

6. Send all orienteers home. Ask those you know are reliable to go eat, drink, put cell phone on the charger, rest a few hours, dress in warm dry clothes, and prepare to return with 24hour pack including headlamps etc. to search at night.


A minimal plan for someone needing medical attention on a course would be:

1. Call 911. At a minimum this gets you medical direction by phone.

2. Send 2 people to the injured party with food, water, warm clothing for them and the subject, and a cell phone or radio.

Depending what information you have at the outset, sometimes you can do #2 first. Carrying the injured party to a trailhead seems like a good idea but it can so easily do more harm than good. If the person cannot walk out, wait for a litter.

I directed most of my comments in response to Una, but there were other good points between her initial statement and my response, so thank you to those people who are thinking about SAR and who are presenting good ideas. Greg's point about using epunching to determine an orienteer's LKP (Last Known Point in SAR terms) is genius, but I was warned that if you don't know what you are doing, you can easily erase all records for that course.

The Sample SAR plan is located on the website in the Sanctioning part (very early in that part). Being computer-challenged, I looked a long time before I found it. I think it used to pop right up on the old site if you typed in a key word or two. Also, I believe there was at least one other plan on the old site--maybe from GAOC? Not sure.

To save time, here are the links Chuck is referring to:

Sample SAR Plan

which is listed on this page of the Orienteering USA website.

Thank you!

One of Una's comments sparked a thought that we ought to come up with a format and have an incident report so that clubs and individuals can report on specific orienteering searches (and rescues) in which they have participated. If we get enough data, we should be able to prepare better guidelines for meet planning. I think we are all convinced that a hasty search of nearby trails and roads works well, but do we have data to back that up?

I can immediately recall being part of five orienteering searches, all successful, sometimes despite what we did. To back up an earlier point, not a one of them was at an A-meet, and all five involved inexperienced orienteers, or staff. I'm happy to write them up if someone has an idea of what should be included and if someone would volunteer to collect them... we may possibly get an idea by looking at the Lost Person Behavior books, or SAR websites, or Una may know what should be included.

The most serious* orienteering SAR situation I've been involved with, which included notifying the sheriff, was finally resolved when the missing person arrived at home and we were able to contact him by telephone -- he had left the meet site without reporting in, and it took him a while to drive home (fortunately, he went straight home). This was prior to cell phones being common. Not being able to find his car did not tell us that he was safe, it just left the situation ambiguous.

*This was not the most serious orienteering emergency, but it was the one that involved the most grief regarding a "missing" person, at least among cases I can think of.

Thanks, glennon. The Sample SAR Plan is the same document that is at the link I posted, namely http://home.comcast.net/~rshannonhouse/SafetyPlan.... .

I suspect that many of us have "war stories" concerning "lost" competitors. Rather than wait for Chuck to accumulate enough of them through some future set of reports, perhaps some volunteer could rough out an "incident report sheet" and we could collect a bunch from the past to help bootstrap the process. I can think of three that I would be willing to write up - all were resolved by some version of what has already been described, but perhaps knowing the frequency of different situations would also be helpful. Of course, all of this also needs someone to gather (and categorize) the data.

I recall 4 instances of overdue orienteers in our club, none serious. One was an experienced orienteer who ran off the map and kept attempting to relocate and try another approach to the same control. This orienteer lost track of time. Upon review of the incident we realized the course had bad design at that control (edge of the map and in vague terrain) and we really needed to extend the map farther in that area (which we did). One was me and a 5yo child on a score-O; the child ran out of gas and we were more than an hour overdue. In both of these incidents response from the meet director was nil. The 3rd and 4th incidents were at the same meet, and I was meet director. Both were juniors on their first solo advanced course. Both had merely become distracted by finding something of interest. One junior was just a few minutes overdue, and in sight before the deadline. The other was more than an hour overdue. Not only did I start the initial search but I called 911 at about 40 minutes overdue. We found this junior on the course about 30 minutes later and before I got through to SAR. (That's another story.)

Our club has not been conscientious about the finish deadline. We have been lucky too, that this has not had serious consequences. I have been on enough SAR missions where the reporting party waiting a few hours has resulted in permanent disability or death.

Here is what I would want on an incident report form for an overdue orienteer.

~~~~~~~~~~

Name and role of person completing form, and date form completed:

Incident date and location:
Name of orienteering club:
Name and age of subject(s):

Time of finish deadline:
Time meet director determined someone was overdue:
Actions taken by meet director and staff, including time initiated:
[lots of room here]

Incident sequence of events, so far as is known:
[lots of room here]

Outcome:

Lessons learned:
[lots of room here]

~~~~~~~~~~

The report could be made by meet director, other meet staff, the overdue orienteer, or an observer, separately or together. The important thing is to learn from mistakes and successes alike. I would want a report for every overdue orienteer. This deals only with overdue orienteers, meaning people who don't come back in time and their location and condition are unknown. The report could be generalized to include injuries that are not "overdue". Would that be useful? Eg, time of injury vs time meet director determines there is an injury severe enough to require an organizational response.

Such reports normally re confidential.

We should also consider other "bad" events, such as a sudden change in weather. See the following report from GNC2002 which was very close to having mass hypothermia casualties.
http://home.comcast.net/~rshannonhouse/SAR%20repor...

Good point, Chuck. New Mexico Orienteers has held meets in forests during severe wildfire season and in canyons during monsoon season. In one case, we held the meet in full view of a smoke plume from a wildfire a few miles away. I do have some specific ideas about how to evacuate a meet in the event of a local wildfire or flash flood advisory. But our most frightening incidents by far have been encounters with bear mothers and cubs. Probably we should write plans for what to do when that happens again.

In SAR, evacuation plans for the searchers are part of the planning process. No SAR field team should head out into the field (ie away from their vehicles) without a briefing about current and predicted weather conditions, but then we send them out with the understanding that they may have to stay out for 24 hours.

A comment about plans. Plans intended for as needed future use should focus more on what exactly needs to be done and say nothing about who should do it. Eg, a plan for aggressive bears should list specific actions to take immediately, such as tell the meet director; intercept and warn or stop competitors at a control outside the area where the bear is; call land owner/manager and community animal control; get all dogs on leash. The plan must identify exactly who to call, with phone numbers. The plan will be used in the midst of an emergency, so it has to be ultra simple and specific.

Perhaps the best message, if we could somehow get it across, is that the person ultimately responsible for anyone's survival in an emergency situation is that person. In other words, your survival is up to you (but we will try to help)!

your survival is up to you

Doesn't that go without saying? The problem lies in the "we will try to help" part.

A novice meet director needs a mentor who is an experienced meet director. Ideally the mentor is there in person. If not, the mentor should be available by phone at any moment during the meet. Ideally, a novice meet director has experience doing all the other jobs involved in setting up and running a meet, and the meet staff that day is experienced.

Initial searches are very simple and pretty much the same every time. Focus on:

1. information: subject's vehicle and cell phone, movements observed by others
2. containment: finish, subject's vehicle, safety bearing, intersections on perimeter
3. hasty search: backward on subject's course, forward on subject's course, trails

The meet director must remain at the meet base. If there are not enough other people who can calmly do hasty searches, containment, etc. it is time to call 911.

The incident at GNC2002 was not a SAR incident; it was an emergency management near incident. SAR and emergency management are very different incident types, and in most jurisdictions response to them is provided by different organizations.

One element of this incident that does apply to SAR and to local orienteering meets in general, is "thin staffing". Too few volunteers. Yes you can get by with almost no staff. I have even participated at meets where the planned meet staff was 1 person throughout, briefly 2 people. Meet directors, please recruit extra volunteers, and if there are "too many" then use that as an opportunity to train your volunteers. Assign some of them to unfamiliar jobs so they get broader experience. Assign more experienced staff to coach others, or assign less experienced staff to assist others.

My heart goes out to the lone "SAR person" at GNC2002. I too have been loaded with multiple incompatible jobs and far more responsibility than any one person could meet, while given no resources nor authority nor support from authority.

Nested in the GNC2002 emergency management incident report is an unattended child. The meet offered babysitting but the parents chose not to use it, simply telling the 5yo to remain "here". That could have become a huge SAR incident: a young child lost in cold, wet weather in the middle of another crisis. Incidents like this merit the highest urgency. If a young child is reported to meet staff as missing, please spend no more than 10 minutes searching before calling 911. Elementary school children in the United States are among the most difficult search subjects, because they are so deeply impressed with "Stranger Danger" programs in school that they are likely to hide from searchers.

I don't have much to add about the search and rescue aspects of that situation but I was surprised at the tone of the incident report when describing the cultural gaps of the family in question. It seems to me that unnecessary attention was spent on describing how the mother changed in the parking lot, as if being comfortable changing in a semi-public setting was in some way damning.

In one case, we held the meet in full view of a smoke plume from a wildfire a few miles away.

The 1989 US Team Trials were held in a forest fire (as in, I crossed the line of flames four times during my course).

The 1989 US Team Trials were held in a forest fire (as in, I crossed the line of flames four times during my course).


And the 'plan' for that race? Send out the Canadians into the fire first!

First time reading that report. Very interesting.

I crossed the line of flames

Ground fire? In a crowning fire that would be risking death due to asphyxiation.

The above mentioned GNC2002 report describes a meet at which start and finish were separated and how the separation contributed to the incident. This is highly relevant to my O club as we prepare for a large turnout at a winter meet. I would like to see a course map for that meet.

Re the unattended child, I agree the GNC2002 report gives far too much irrelevant and personal detail about the family. Leaving children unattended is not a "foreign" practice. At a playground beside a highway I have found children in distress (hungry, dehydrated, hypothermic, and scared) who had been left there for many hours with no food, water, or jacket while their all American parents did business in town.

Yes, ground fire, mostly leaf litter burning, but also bushes. The air quality was dramatically different behind the flames.

Curiosity got the best of me. What a bizarre report.

Indeed! No self-respecting gal from that part of the world would neglect to change her panties.

Neil she was not wearing any. ; )