By Hannah Gallagher, Lake County Search and Rescue
During my career in search and rescue, time and again I have encountered people who hold a lot of knowledge and experience and who freely share that knowledge with their peers. This is noteworthy because the members of these teams are usually volunteers, stretched thin and wearing too many hats: they would be justified if they were cautious of volunteering more of their time to others. Instead, not only are these people “open doors” to knowledge for their teams, but they also welcome others from the SAR community to share in their knowledge. Here’s a story from earlier this year.
One July morning, I swung by the headquarters for my search and rescue team to check in about an ongoing search. We had gotten a call for a missing person, an elderly woman with suspected but undiagnosed dementia, who was visiting Leadville from Florida. She had wandered away from her Airbnb the previous day, annoyed that she could not smoke in her rental house, and our ground teams had not yet been able to find her. Her family was terribly worried. We were deep in the trenches of pulling together one of the first complex multi-agency searches our county has led in recent history. In a resource mobilization that never ceases to amaze me, professional SAR volunteers and resources were called up and sprang into response from across the state to begin a coordinated search. We had 35 ground searchers and several ATVs from Arapahoe Rescue Patrol, a high school-based team from the greater Denver area; ground searchers and a drone from neighboring Chaffee County SAR North; searchers from Summit County Rescue Group; and five search dog teams, with both air scent and trailing dogs, from Search and Rescue Dogs of Colorado and Front Range Rescue Dogs. Resources were all integrated in a near seamless action. This type of mobilization often occurs in collaboration with the Colorado Search and Rescue Association, who pulls together the SAR teams from across the state to connect them to each other for support. Amid the efforts to organize these various groups of first responders, I found myself on the phone with an expert and mentor of mine from CSAR whom I knew would freely share his knowledge in this high stakes operation. Bruce Beckmann, a teammate from my previous SAR team and a CSAR state coordinator, immediately rallied to answer my questions about various resources being called in and connected our team’s leaders to other experts who similarly sprang into action to collaborate with us while organizing the many different teams arriving. Within minutes of calling, other state coordinators from CSAR were brought into our call to plan and make decisions about which resources should be called upon and how they could support our own team’s skilled leaders in our operations. When speaking about the search efforts, their language was immediately about “our” subject and “our” resources; never did I hear language that made me feel like they were outsiders looking in on our efforts. When one of these mentors speaks to me about an incident I am a part of, it’s from the posture of someone who has pulled up a chair and is looking at the same map as I am – invested in our success.
After a long day of searching, at about 7:00 that evening, we found our subject and she was surprisingly alive and well after spending a night out. She had somehow gotten herself stuck on a steep embankment below a set of railroad tracks, in dense trees. Our team of teams set up a rope rigging system to bring her back up the embankment, brought her out of the field by rail car, and delivered her back to her grateful family.
That day in July, I was positioned to be a conduit of critical knowledge to my SAR team by virtue of connecting with others wiser and more experienced than myself. Watching those people serve their communities with knowledge and experience, I was inspired to be like them: open doors to others, with a welcome mat laid out for encouragement.