Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book/First Aid/Searches

In wilderness areas searches are conducted in an ever widening circle normally. All available resources are used including hunting dogs, aircraft, search hikers, and mounted search personnel. When a person is lost in the wilderness there is rarely any expense spared in the search for the person. If details are known about intended camping sites and hiking routes then teams will be sent to investigate those locations directly while others are sent into line of site search patterns where from the best known location for the missing person(s) was outward with each searcher being within site of the next. This will also be done in staggered waves so that any evidence overlooked by one searcher might be found by the next. When the area becomes large enough to make line of site searches impractical the teams will be broken into zones using a search grid. A team of two or more will be assigned some small piece of the map area to search, all areas will be searched repeatedly for missed evidence or people. All the while roadways and known paths will have searches, or outposts on them in case the victim is still mobile and trying to work his way out of his circumstance. Aircraft will search in grids as well when weather provides. At night some aircraft may utilize heat sensors to try and identify people in the wilderness, this has proven effective at times and at other times not. When an aircraft identifies a possible victim a search team in the grid will respond to the location, sometimes they find nothing; other times they find animals. If a person is seeking shelter in a very cold area, he may have burrowed deep enough into a location as to defeat the heat sensors on any aircraft as was the case with a child in Arizona who hid among some cactus which cool greatly at night. This particular child had evaded rescuers intentionally for more than a day because he was not supposed to talk to strangers.

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