Thursday, April 9, 1987
Section: NEIGHBORS HORSHAM
Page: H05
At a state mental hospital last year, an orderly discovered on one of his rounds that a patient was missing.
A "hasty" search - one involving checks of such obvious places as side streets and restaurants - was conducted by local and state police and fire officials.
After eight to 10 hours, the search was called off, with police concluding that the patient had "hitched a ride and left the area."
Dissatisfied with that explanation, a group of trained search-and-rescue volunteers headed for some nearby woods. Their instincts proved correct. They found the patient, but too late. He was dead.
The case is fairly typical of the many botched search-and-rescue missions that occur throughout Pennsylvania each year, say trained search-and-rescue volunteers.
As the volunteers tell it, authorities on the scene tend to fight over control of the search, then arrive at conclusions based more on their own faulty intuitions than on evidence.
And when they do send searchers into the woods, the searchers tend to be untrained individuals with little knowledge of where they are going or what clues to look for, said Chief of the Springfield Township-based Greater Philadelphia Search and Rescue, an organization of trained volunteers.
"The old concept of a wilderness search was to line up a group of people shoulder to shoulder and walk through the woods until you stumble onto the victim," he said.
By then, it usually is too late.
Botched rescue missions frequently occur because "there's no legal agent responsible for search and rescue in Pennsylvania," said Tom Hircharck of Keystone Search and Rescue in Altoona.
They recently created a statewide group, the Pennsylvania Search and Rescue Council, to provide manpower and technical advice to local and state emergency departments.
The 400 are members of 22 volunteer search-and-rescue groups in the state. At a recent meeting at the Ogontz campus of Pennsylvania State University in Abington, the Coast Guard and the state Department of Environmental Resources (DER) also agreed to join the council.
At their meeting delegates drafted a constitution and by-laws. The next step is to seek state-government recognition of the council's expertise and service.
The DER has 72 search managers serving 100 state parks. However, the officials concede that not all the search managers have the advanced field experience or the paramedic first-aid training that many of the volunteers have. Nor does the agency have the manpower, resources and search-management skills to carry out an extended rescue misssion, state park officials said.
"A lot of calls go to the fire company, and they go out to the woods with good intentions and beat the bush," which destroys any clues or evidence, said Maurice E. Hobaugh, a DER district forester in Pottstown.
Members of the newly formed council say that more timely and successful searches can be made if police and fire authorities call the searchers in as soon as they receive reports of lost hunters, children and other people.
They say that the council has the equipment and the ability to provide emergency-response service above and below ground in any part of Pennsylvania within hours.
They say their specialized teams, each of 10 to 20 rescuers who train continuously, can carry out such missions as cave and mine rescues, can apply first aid, can interview witnesses, can guide air-scent and ground-tracking dogs, and can provide radio communications.
They say they are experts in what they describe as "search management" - a scientific approach to search and rescue developed in the late 1960s by the National Park Service.
The approach is based on case studies that catalogued the behavior of lost people on different types of terrain.
"The basic underlying theory is to know where the lost subject isn't, versus where they are," the GPSAR Chief said. In other words, "it's just as important to know where the person isn't to concentrate efforts where they probably are."
The objectives are to limit the cost of large-area searches and increase the probability of finding the lost person alive, he said.
The chances of success are directly related to an area's size, according to a guide published by the Emergency Response Institute. The search area is determined by the "potential maximum distance traveled by the subject," according to the institute guide.
A simple method of calculation developed by the National Park Service takes into account the point where the person was last seen and the number of hours the person has been missing in determining a probable distance traveled.
For example, you would not expect an 88-year-old person to travel the same distance as an 8-year-old.