I’m pleased today to be able to offer you a special guest post to the Re-Search website. Johnnie Walker from Sussex Search and Rescue sent me an e-mail today offering the following;

I have found myself using the following analogy quite a bit.  Is there a place for it on your website?

I know that to you it is stating the obvious.  However, a saying I use quite a lot in SAR is ‘we always state the obvious.  That way, everyone knows the same obvious.’

A lot of Mispers die while search teams ‘patchwork’ sectors across the landscape, rather than producing a scenario based plan, and targeting specific areas by Misper type and specific intelligence.  This is a search tactic that has grown out of Police forensic searching, and is actually very counter intuitive.

Imagine you are at the park with a child.  They are on the swings.  You take your eye of them for a moment, and when you look back, they have vanished.  Where do you search?

• You search the play park; purposefully wandering to check under the slide and in the climbing frame.  This is your hub.

• You run to the pond, because you know they like to see the ducks, and the field at the edge of the park where the donkey lives.  These are your reflectors.

• You run their route home, you check the home address, and then you go back to the park and check the route to their friend’s house. These are your spokes.

What you would never even consider doing is getting a map of the park and surrounding area, and searching each grid square one at a time.  You might do that the next day, if they were still missing, but you would know in your heart that ‘search is an emergency’. You need to find them quickly, and to do this you need to search in very specific places; places you identify from what you know about them.

I obviously think there is a place for such wisdom on this website. I particularly like the “same obvious” quote!

So a big thank you to Johnnie for taking the time to think about sharing this with everyone on this website and for putting pen to paper.

If you have something to share, please e-mail me. I’m happy to put useful content on here from anyone! [Saves me writing stuff every day!]