Mounted search and rescue

["Jorene Downs" <Jorene@CEOates.com>]

I suspect Tomi' is correct and many regions have fewer rural / wilderness
searches as the population expands and subdivisions replace farmlands, etc.
Those of us with huge state and/or national parks and forests in our
response areas are likely to continue with a higher number of searches. 

The vast majority of our local responses are up the mountain (Sierra
Nevadas) at 4000-9000 feet in thousands of adjoining acres of national
forests, and occasionally at the 9-14,000+ foot peaks where we usually only
send the technical teams. I recall for several years running locally we had
75-100 SAR incidents every year in our county, plus mutual aid response out
of county in CA where there are sometimes 30 or more search incidents going
at a time statewide. Many of our local incidents are multi-agency /
multi-jurisdiction because the wilderness area is so vast. Searches down in
the valley's more rural agricultural areas tend to be infrequent.

The use of technology such as GPS - or the economy reducing travel -
(instead of population expansion) is more likely to cause reduction of SAR
in a vast wilderness region like ours, and we have been seeing the impact.
Our number of annual local SAR incidents has reduced at least 25% the past
few years compared to the prior total of 75-100. 

As the number of SAR incidents reduce, MSAR with additional or more
specialized training have the advantage of potential for activation over
more limited traditional MSAR teams. (For example, trained to perform
evacuation in the saddle, or horses trained to scent and alert like SAR
dogs.) Some MSAR are also getting involved in disaster response, locally
assisting in equine evacuation or performing another role. (Online FEMA
training for IS-317 is highly recommended as basic education for any SAR
also doing disaster response. Some regions already require this very basic
training. http://training.fema.gov/IS/crslist.asp )

- - - - - -
Jorene Downs
SAR & CERT
Mounted SAR
www.ceoates.com/msar


-----Original Message-----
From: T'mi Fi
[...]
One likely explanation for the reduction of search missions is your area
could be due to the change in land usage. Excluding the NW region of your 90
mile radius and according to demographic conversion of land usage for that
region; over 75% of the (privately owned) rural land, where wilderness types
searches were once conducted in 1979, has been converted to mixed use urban
and suburban properties.  

T'mi
www.trotsar.org

IRVIN LICHTENSTEIN wrote:

>On the public record there have been no field deployments of either the dog
>team or us since 2005 in the region.  There have been 2 cancellations for
>institutional walk a ways who were located by the fire company (same one,
>same institution) as they arrived. (.......)
>
>It is odd because from 1979 to 1995, the period for which detailed
>statistics were available in 2005, there were 12 field deployments per year
>in a 90 mile radius, lasting mostly from 18 to 36 hours initially.  One
>lasted 72 hours but this was primarily because out of towners were involved
>and wanted to play in an interstate, multi-agency environment. 
>


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