RESCUE AND EVACUATION - Medicine for Mountaineering and Other Wilderness Activities - page 81

Rescue by John C. Hempel and Annette Fregeau-Conover (Huntsville, AL: National Spe-
leological Society, 2001).
In the expedition setting, search is usually limited or unnecessary, because either the
location of the party needing rescue is known or the party is inaccessible to the rest of the
expedition.Iftheexpeditionisdividedintoteams,aninjuryorequipmentmalfunctionmay
break the chain of communication and the only knowledge that one team may have is that
another team failed to arrive at a destination or failed to communicate as scheduled. When
this occurs, the rest of the expedition must initiate a search for the missing party.
Search is an emergency. The common admonition not to worry because an overdue per-
sonorgroupisverycapable isoftentheoppositeofthecorrectinterpretation, whichisthat
this very capable party may be in real trouble since a rendezvous or radio call was missed.
Expeditions can increase safety byfrequent radio contact. With the increasing availabil-
ity of GPS, expeditions have the potential for keeping track of the location of every mem-
ber and every equipment cache in real time.
The search phase of search and rescue can be conceptualized in many ways. A common
schema breaks search into phases of first notice, planning or strategy, and tactics. First no-
tice on an expedition may consist of a radio call from a team that is in trouble, or it may be
inferred from the failure of a team to arrive at a location or communicate as planned.
Next the expedition leader or a designated member determines the search strategy,
which should be mostly preplanned. For example, if a team fails to arrive at a rendezvous
as expected, a series of routine steps is initiated, which could include extra radio calls, al-
ternate means of communications, such as whistles or flares, or sending out a search party
to the expected location of the missing team.
Inorganizedsearchandrescue,individualsareoftenfoundwiththeaidofastrategythat
includes determining their last known location (“point last seen”) and confining the search
areabydefiningtheperimeterbeyondwhichthemissingindividualisunlikelytobefound.
The next step is to determine likely routes of travel and to perform a “hasty” search with
small fast teams or aircraft along these routes. A large search often culminates in “satur-
ation searching” with large numbers of searchers looking for clues. At this phase, formal
estimates of the likelihood of finding a lost person in each part of the search area are made
based on the likelihood of the person being in the given location and the probability of de-
tection using different search methods.
For an isolated expedition, search tactics would likely start with “survey” methods, in-
cludingcontactingotherteamsthatmightbeincontactwiththemissingteamandnoiseand
flares to be answered in kind. The next step, for expeditions without motorized or airborne
resources, would likely employ oldfashioned methods such as sending a team or teams to
the likely location(s) of the lost team and along likely routes of travel (“scratch” or “hasty”
search). Scratch teams would carry a radio and a minimum amount of survival, rescue, and