Has your SAR team got a Zombie Plan?

I love this … http://emergency.cdc.gov/socialmedia/zombies_blog.asp … What a great way to introduce emergency planning and disaster preparedness to the population!

And it made me think too;

Has your SAR team got an emergency plan? How will you deal with a disaster?
What about day-to-day issues such as a flu epidemic? A fuel crisis?

But I also got thinking about whether we are sometimes too serious in our publicity material …

And maybe too serious the rest of the time too …

Except

May 23, 2011 · Robert Bradley · No Comments
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Technical Rescue eMagazine

Just a very quick post today; I’m busy writing a presentation …

The new edition of the Technical Rescue eMagazine is out and available at http://www.trescue.com/eMag/TRmEmag20/index.html

If nothing else, an interesting piece on Health & Safety and a piece on Mountain Rescue – Afghanistan Style!

May 19, 2011 · Robert Bradley · No Comments
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Search and Rescue Tracking Books

Following on from yesterday’s thoughts on David Housley’s SARWorld article, I had yet another thought. A while back the domain name www.trackerbooklist.com expired – meaning whoever owned it let it lapse. I bought it with the intention of building a website with recommendations of books for tracking. I never got around to it – maybe I will work on it now …

But for now, here are my top search and rescue tracking books available on Amazon.co.uk;

Tracking: A Blueprint for Learning How by Jack Kearney – The classic book, a must-have for anyone interested in tracking!

Tracking–Signs of Man, Signs of Hope: A Systematic Approach to the Art and Science of Tracking Humans by David Diaz

The Complete Guide to Tracking: Concealment, Night Movement, and All Forms of Pursuit Following Tracks, Trails and Signs, Using 22 SAS Techniques by Bob Carss

Tactical Tracking Operations: The Essential Guide for Military and Police Trackers by David Scott-Donelan

Animal Tracks and Signs (Pocket Nature Guide) by Bang and Dahlstrom – The best book on animal track and sign there is!

 

Plus a quick mention for Rob Speiden’s Foundations for Awareness, Signcutting and Tracking, not available yet on Amazon.co.uk but well worth a read if you are interested in SAR Tracking!

May 18, 2011 · Robert Bradley · No Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Search Books, Search Links, Search Thoughts

SARWorld – Another Phoenix rising from the ashes?

A quick plug today for a new article on the SARWorld website.

David Housley from Midshires Search and Rescue has written a piece on outdoor skills and search and rescue, exploring the use of tracking and “natural navigation” within lowland search teams. Well worth a read, and feel free to join in the debate and comment on the SARWorld Search and Rescue Forum too…

However, his article got me thinking about two totally separate issues.

The first is about paid professional trainers. How come within ALSAR there is a natural acceptance that people with skills such as tracking and other outdoor skills should be paid to come and do training for teams? There are a number of companies that run training courses (albeit at cheap rates) specifically for search and rescue teams. But we do not like people charging for “search” training in the same way. Obviously I first noticed this at UKLSI – which never had paid employees, but people would always moan at the cost of the course – despite the amazing amount of additional knowledge the instructors had about search.

Why shouldn’t we “reward” those people who take the time and effort – outside and additional to the usual effort of SAR training – to learn these vastly greater knowledge and skill sets when they teach others, in the same way we do for trackers etc.?

One argument that people might use is that they can get “search” training from others for free/cheap. For those that think this I have one counter-argument; do you really think all “search” training is of the same standard and the instructors are of the same quality? I have seen lots of searchers and search instructors in my time and I can guarantee you that whilst there are some excellent instructors with both good search knowledge and teaching skills, there are a great deal more who should not be teaching search because they lack the necessary level of knowledge to do so!

By not creating a “marketplace” where quality and value matters, are we downgrading the importance of “search” training?

My second thought is about the SARWorld website; it is still ticking away in the background which is great but should I put in some more effort to spark it off again? I know I do not have the necessary people skills to round up and keep a group of “authors” going to keep the website running regularly – but this is what it needs. But I think SARWorld – both the idea and the website would be great.

Anyone want to help?

 

May 17, 2011 · Robert Bradley · 2 Comments
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When Missing Person search goes horribly wrong

I seem to have written quite a bit about missing persons recently, rather than the physical search for them. This is because it is very easy for SAR volunteers to become cacooned in their own little bubble of SAR and forget about the “big picture”.

Following on from my pieces on the effects of police cuts on missing person incidents and will the police be downgrading missing person calls I received an e-mail from one of our colleagues in the Irish Search Dogs Association tipping me off to some news articles on an Irishman who went missing in Amsterdam.

Paul Nolan Miralles went missing after a night out. Here is part of the Irish Times news report about his disappearance and the subsequent body find;

A police search failed to locate his body despite several sightings of a man answering his description floating in the water, near to where he had last been seen on the Singel canal.

There were separate reported sightings by his mother, who came from Dublin to help search, and also his workmates, in the days that followed his disappearance.

The Dutch police search, however, was officially called off last Wednesday even though a shoulder had already been found in the water, which DNA tests have since established to be part of Mr Nolan Miralles’s remains.

The shredded remains of his jacket and shoulder bag had also been discovered in the propeller of a canal pleasure launch.

His body appears to have been sucked under the water and caught in the propeller of the glass-topped canal launch filled with tourists shortly after being spotted for the last time.

Throughout last Thursday his family recovered eight further body parts using a boat driven by a client of the dead man and sonar equipment operated by his cousin, a marine biologist.

The family say that when help was finally offered by the Dutch authorities late on Thursday night it was in the form of two “very supportive” family liaison officers. This followed repeated requests by the family and through diplomatic channels.

By then, according to Mr Nolan Miralles’s sister, Anne Ravanona, family members were “completely traumatised, devastated and living a nightmare for five days of the search”.

“It has been horrific, a nightmare, so harrowing, and no family should have gone through this ordeal, left alone to suffer the trauma of pulling bits of my brother’s body out of a canal”, said Ms Ravanona, a Paris-based global management training expert.

On Good Friday the district police precinct dispatched four divers into the canal. The police had earlier asked the family if police could also use the boat and sonar equipment that the family had arranged.

When the dead man’s family thought that “things could not get any worse” a large portion of his lower body was found by the family floating in the water, Ms Ravanona said.

“My husband and my brother and cousin had to hold on to it for an hour awaiting the police boat dispatched to pick it up. Paul’s girlfriend was there also; that was beyond human endurance.”

She said these remains were moved from the canal side by the coroner and treated with care and respect before being taken to the morgue. On Thursday the family had had to contact police each time they recovered body parts, which were taken away in a bucket and a box

You can hear the misper’s sister talking about it on NewsTalk as well.

Now I try to make it a rule not to talk about individual cases and especially those in which there is only the media’s viewpoint but whatever the truth in this case it highlights the importance of getting the management of the missing person case right first time and supporting the missing person’s family if searches do not find the misper. Because they will look for their family and friends themselves, as seen here, and who would want another family to have to find their dead relative, or friend to find the remains of their dead friend – whatever the condition of the body!

It would be easy to dismiss this as all happening in a different country but just a couple of months ago I received an e-mail from the family of a long-term missing person asking me; “What can I do to organise a search, inform other people interested in helping, or employ a team to look for him? I am desperate for information…” here in the UK.

Fortunately it was me they turned to and I could point them straight back to the police; but what-if? What if I had been someone who would have taken their money? What if I had been the sort to organise a family search?

Or should the question actually be – should there be someone these vulnerable, desperate people can turn too?

May 16, 2011 · Robert Bradley · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Search Links, Search Thoughts