Volunteers trained to become part of organized search teams.
By Brandon Loomis
Anchorage Daily News
Copyright 2007 Anchorage Daily News
All Rights Reserved
ANCHOR POINT, Alaska — Twenty volunteers trained with Alaska state troopers over the weekend and could become the first organized citizens’ search-and-rescue team in a borough that officials say sorely needs some.
The Kenai Peninsula, Anchorage’s backyard and an outdoors playground for its own 50,000 residents, is a glaring blank spot in the state’s network of 43 volunteer search groups. Volunteer firefighters and snowmachine clubs, among others, often join in searches, but without proper training they may do more harm than good, said Lt. Craig Macdonald, the troopers’ search and rescue coordinator.
Untrained volunteers typically head out looking for a person rather than for the vital clues that a person may leave, Macdonald said. They step on identifying footprints and ignore signs such as gum wrappers that match a missing person’s known favorite brand. So instead of sending well-meaning armies of locals into the Kenai’s forests and mountains, he’ll sometimes call out trained volunteers and dogs from Anchorage and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.
“I can certainly think of a couple searches where the response was delayed because we had to bring people in,” Macdonald said.
It is potentially a serious problem for a borough about the size of West Virginia with a wealth of backcounty hunting, fishing and snow sports terrain. Since the fiscal year began in July, rescuers have conducted 77 searches on the Kenai, according to troopers. During the complete 2006 fiscal year, the Kenai accounted for 129 of 794 statewide searches. Yet while Ketchikan, Nome and practically every sizable community in between has a trained rescue group, the Kenai has gone without for years.
Macdonald traveled here Friday to start a three-day session aimed at changing that. The Anchor Point Volunteer Fire Department requested training, and a few Homer firefighters sat in with the intention of spreading the knowledge to their ranks.
“Rather than them going out with the greatest intentions to search, this will magnify their efforts,” Macdonald said.
Volunteer Patricia Graham said she wants to help because she knows what it’s like to lose someone. A family friend was lost on a boat in Hawaii and his remains weren’t found for 10 years. And at home in Homer four years ago, her 9-year-old son went missing briefly. Even though it lasted little more than an hour, she said, it made her realize how much help people need in such horrifying moments.
“I’ve been there,” she said. “You can’t think. You’re so out of your mind and crazed that you can’t manage your own life,” let alone a search.
“I want to do community service,” she said. “It’s nice to be needed.”
The weekend training sessions represent the first of three levels of nationally recognized standards and involve mostly classroom learning with some compass and map reading. The next level toward accreditation as a trained volunteer group is 40 hours on a navigation course, and 80 percent of participants nationwide fail it, Macdonald said.
Friday evening he started class with a prop: a jigsaw puzzle, of which everyone got five pieces. He asked them to work together to solve it in five minutes. Though they couldn’t finish, they did quickly organize to find the perimeter of edge pieces, which Macdonald said is a crucial first step that untrained searchers might miss as they disperse. And, as the puzzle team did with what turned out to be a picture of Spider-Man, untrained searchers might head out without asking the basics, like what the person looked like or wore. The team also should know a missing person’s intentions and habits.
“If you come looking for me, I chew Teaberry gum,” Macdonald told the class.
Searchers also need to plan their missions with careful attention to topographic maps and keep in mind that lost people tend to move downward, the path of least resistance, he said.
And finally, as simple as it sounds, volunteers need to be coordinated and easily contacted if they’re to be of use, Macdonald said.
Homer Fire Chief Bob Painter said his department’s volunteers often pitch in on searches, and he’s hoping they can gain from the training. He also offered to help coordinate an area search-and-rescue team.
“Our hope is to have more people quickly mobilized, (in Homer) and in Anchor Point,” Painter said. “Our people are connected by pagers, and for Anchor Point, our dispatch dispatches for them.”
Macdonald said that he hopes the training leads to a volunteer team, and that he’s also talked to Seward area volunteers about training a group.