Mounted search and rescue

[Una Smith <una.smith@att.net>]

If ATVs are not usable off the ATV owner's own property, there is little
point going to any great lengths to train with them.

Irvin Lichtenstein  wrote:
>                                                                    One of
>the remarkable practices in this area is that all the specialty teams (urban
>rescue, mass casualty, disaster relief, technical rescue, fire, etc.) hold
>regularly scheduled drills, exercises, and task force deployments.  They get
>to know each responder personally and how each organization works down to
>the individual responder level.  This is necessary for good interaction in a
>real emergency.

This is how it should be, I think.  This is how it sort of works for SAR
in New Mexico.  Statewide, the SAR community is one big family and people
who wear SAR management hats (like me, now and then) need to know the
people who make up the field teams.  But we are not so well coordinated
with other agencies.

At the last mission I participated in, 2 weeks ago, I recognized a little
more than half of the ~50 SAR responders who participated.  Some whose
faces I had never seen before, I have "known" online for years.  Meeting
those folks in person is really cool...  That was a successful mission
in that we found the subject, alive and in excellent condition under the
circumstances.  It was a not-so-successful mission in that there were
some problems that should not have been problems.  But from these we can
learn!  It involved a lot of different agencies:  municipal police and
fire departments, state police, SAR, a national security facility, and a
national park.  We used a helipad and certain procedures of a national
interagency wildfire management team, and all the agencies involved got
valuable practice working together outside of a big national security or
disaster incident.

        Una Smith
        New Mexico