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msar-riders - Re: [MSAR] Shenandoah Park Fiasco

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  • From: "IRVIN LICHTENSTEIN" <ilichten1@verizon.net>
  • To: "'Mounted search and rescue'" <msar-riders@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [MSAR] Shenandoah Park Fiasco
  • Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2006 15:39:59 -0400

According to the material in the ERI text there was a very big search for a
very important lost person, the kid of a really important person (member of
Politically Important as I recall) in the Shenandoah National Park/Forest
and surrounding areas. The Park Service spent hundreds of thousands of paid
man hours, brought in military helicopters and established somewhat
permanent base camps, landing zones (complete with airport crash trucks),
thousands of community volunteers, cut roads in old growth forests, and
didn't find a clue, let alone the person or a body. In the after action
analysis the classic causes of failure were outlined-- lack of command, lack
of communications between leadership, inefficient use of resources, use of
resources of unknown quality, outside pressures, etc. One of the results of
the report was the commissioning of a manual on search for the NPS which
became NASAR's Managing the Search Function. When I took the NASAR version
of the course around late 1985 the Shenandoah search was the introduction to
the course. The federal manual was written by the founders of ERI. I am not
sure of the date without digging out the old books but it was probably the
1970's.

Irv Lichtenstein





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