Your Crisis Team Customizes Search and Rescue Education for National Park Rangers

It hardly seemed like work, to spend three days in Shenandoah National Park in late September, but the crew at Your Crisis Team puts in three solid days educating National Park Service employees to enhance their Search and Rescue skills.

 

The class was a mix of law enforcement rangers, back-country rangers, and key administrative staff (including Public Information, Communications, and GIS). After refreshing map and compass skills, we introduced a few new tricks for students to more effectively use their GPS units. Such as converting location information from US National Grid to Lat-Long and back, which is essential in efficiently and effectively communicating landing zones to incoming medivac choppers or even tracking down cell phone locations.

 

Our primary focus was to empower students to effectively establish the initial actions associated with the first report of a missing person. Including resource typing, putting the right resources in the right places, ensuring the accountability of searchers, and making it easy to document all their decisions and actions. In customizing this course we drew on our subject matter experts in search and rescue, land navigation and lost person behavior.

 

We focused on the skills associated with this phase because 60% of searches can be resolved during this time. By the third day, students demonstrated their ability to effectively start a search mission from anywhere in the park and how to facilitate the next steps for the other 40% of searches which will progress past this point. Including how to identify qualified resources, call them in, and seamlessly integrate them into an expanding incident.

 

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