PCESAR Mock Search 2005Tue., Mar. 22, 2005 20:52:49
I stepped out of my tarp shelter into the torrential rain of Washington’s spring to answer the radio, “Base, this is FL.”
Base replied, “FL, do you have radio contact with Team 4?”
As the rain pelted my face, I answered, “Negative Base, I haven’t been in radio contact with them since they started their assignment. Ask Team 2 to relay.”
This gave me a chance to crawl back into my shelter to avoid the downpour. It was 2100 and I had been up since 0600. All I wanted was to be able to get a hold of all teams to instruct them to bed down. Most teams had already done so, but Team 4 was still out of contact. Sometime after this, I fell asleep, leaving Base to deal with Team 4, though they were technically my responsibility.
I just finished taking care of all my wet gear from this weekend. It barely stopped raining from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. It was a hard weekend, but I know my gear, and managed to keep everything but my shell layers and shelter dry for the weekend. It was a true test of our abilities to survive in adverse weather.
Course 4 this year, held at the Elbe Hills ORV Park, started with a navigation exercise to find our bed-down locations. As I Field Leader, it was my job to rove between teams making sure everything ran smoothly.
To me this seems like an easy exercise, but many of the teams had difficulty finding their way around the area. I walked off in the wrong direction to examine a sign, and on my way back passed a team. I noticed the Team Leader was Curt, and stopped to talk to them. It only took about five minutes to convince them that they were holding the map upside down. That seemed to solve things.
A couple minutes later I caught of up with two other teams heading up the trail. But wait, these two teams were supposed to be heading down the trail. This time it was Frankie and Elizabeth’s teams. Elizabeth I’ll excuse because she’s not going to TL training this year, and was just forced into the position for the weekend. Frankie on the other hand needs to be able to navigate proficiently. After turning them around, I decided to stay with them for a while to make sure they didn’t get lost again. The missed their next turnoff road, but I don’t blame them, I didn’t think it was a road either. It was washed out and bulldozed over. Who would have guessed it would be the correct road? Luckily the next, more defined, road was not much further so we got turned around fairly quickly.
Once they were taken care of I headed back up the road so I would be equidistant from all teams. This should have put me in the same location as Curt’s team had been assigned, but there was no sign of Curt there. I figured they had already gone to sleep and were just a couple hundred feet away in the woods.
I woke up the next morning to a dim, overcast, morning glow in the midst of singing birds, not too bad compared the crummy weather in the remainder of the weekend. It was five minutes before the wake-up call was supposed to come over the radio. Great timing.
Back at base an hour later I asked Curt which way they had come down the hill, as I had not seen his team pass while packing my gear. He showed me on the map, and evidentially they had been in the wrong spot for the night. Normally this would be easily excusable, but the mock search scheduled later in the day was the deciding factor in whether our unit would be recertified for the next few years. Great navigation skills are very important when trying to pass a re-cert.
Throughout the morning, the teams rotated through patient packaging, wilderness navigation, and search theory review stations. During the first two sessions I assisted with the search theory station. Then for the third session I had to fill in for the wilderness navigation instructor. I was slightly concerned about making up an hour and a half class on the spot, but after the class I asked Mike, a Team Leader (TL) in training, how it had went and he thought it was great. Apparently I’m good at making up believable stuff.
The mock search started at noon. Seth reassigned teams so now I was in charge of eight teams rather than just five. Upon hearing this I was reminded of the difficult weekend that was ahead of me.
The search scenario was set with two subjects, a hunter, and a hunter’s wife who had come looking for the hunter a day after he was listed as missing. Our portion of the search started when the 4x4 team found the missing female’s vehicle. I immediately went with four teams to this location.
 I started the teams off with a Type 1 (hasty search of roads and trails to find clues of subject where-abouts), one team in each direction from the PLS (point last seen). As seen in the picture, the road left this point in three directions. There was also a trail intersecting one of the roads. This gave me just enough paths to send one team down each of them.
During the next hour the teams did not find any relevant clues, but defiantly a lot of garbage. I went to inspect some of these clues, but spent the majority of the day at the PLS.
When the teams were finishing their initial assignments, I took a trip back to base to have a meeting with the OL (Operations Leader). We discussed our options considering the teams had not found anything with their Type 1 search. We settled on doing more Type 1 searching, but in a larger radius that the current assignments.
 The teams spent the rest of the day on these new assignments. They still didn’t find anything. I tried to keep tabs on them throughout the evening from my location at the PLS, but there were hills between most of the teams and me, so that was impossible. We stopped for the night around 2100.
Saturday night was very rainy and windy, although the tarp only blew down once at about 0100. I woke up again just before the wake-up call. Most of the teams were not very punctual that morning and didn’t resume their assignments until 0730 or so. We pulled the teams out of the field and back to the PLS pretty soon, as we had decided that their assignment probably would not result in a find.
The only instruction I had from base for the teams’ new assignments was to have them do a Type 2 search. This type of search is in the woods off of the trails, with just enough spacing between people for them to see each other through the brush.
As the trainees were walking into the brush I heard many of them complain about this assignment not being very relevant and that it was just going to be a lot of work. Evidentially they don’t know much about search statistics.
 After about 30 minutes of Type 2 searching, the teams heard a response to one of their voice checks. There was a slight dilemma though. There was a swamp in between us and the sound. I brought the teams back to the road so we could quickly by-pass the swamp, then I took one of the teams in on a trail so that we’d have access to the area faster.
 This proved an effective method, as we found the subject about 15 minutes later.
I don’t feel like writing anymore, so that’s it for now.
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