Sheriff's Office amps up techniques for ground searches

There are few things more terrifying than a small child or a loved one going missing. The moment of realization that a child is not in the house and the ensuing panic are enough to send even the calmest person into a tailspin of anxiety and terror as all the worst case scenarios play out in the head of a parent or a loved one coupled with the desire to just get that person back home.

In these moments, residents depend on the skill sets of local law enforcement, emergency services and volunteers to put boots to the ground, locate those missing and bring them safely back home.

It is because of this dependency and their duty to the public that Kimball County Sheriff Harry Gillway and Sergeant Brandon Loy recently attended the National Search and Rescue School offered through the U.S. Coast Guard and Air Force Rescue Coordination Center to learn better techniques to conduct more efficient searches in those times of crisis.

The exclusive five day course, which is directed towards Search and Rescue (SAR) leaders in federal, state and local emergency services and law enforcement, as well as Civil Air Patrol, international and volunteer SAR agencies, aims for the goal of "find the objective fast", centering on determining where to search, how to divide an area between limited search resources and how to craft the overall search effort to gain the best increases in likelihood of success at each step. According to the website for the course, the tools learned are mathematically based and help quantify the uncertainties of the search problem to allow consistent application throughout a mission.

Though the course was conveniently held in Wayne, Nebraska on the college campus this year, it had previously been only exclusively held on the East coast, according to Sheriff Gillway.

"It used to be, years ago, the National SAR School was run completely out of Governor's Island, New York. Then they moved to Yorktown, Virginia to a new facility with the Coast Guard, and they came to find out that there were plenty of people in the central Atlantic states that were going to it, but they weren't getting it out to everybody. There weren't enough people from the Midwest. There weren't enough people from the West coast coming in. So they decided, oh, 15 years ago or so that they would take this on the road, teach the class, a week-long class, and they would get sponsors, emergency management, other groups would sponsor them and they would set up," Gillway said.

However, though the school is now held in different areas throughout the nation, enrollment in the class is still very competitive with only approximately 22 people being accepted into the course at each location.

"Brandon and I tried for two years to get into this class. It is in high demand. It basically fills up the first day that it's opened in a state. And a lot of people even come in from out of state. We had tried to get into it in New Mexico, and it was full. So we were turned down. This year it was offered and again it filled up in one day. Brandon and I were able to get into it. It's the first time it was ever offered in Nebraska, and of all places, they put it in Wayne right at the college campus there. And it's an excellent course. I knew it was. I talked to a lot of people [about it]," Gillway said.

Though Gillway has conducted a few successful searches for missing persons throughout his time serving in Kimball County, he states that the techniques learned in the class have given him better tools with which to command volunteers and better focus on areas of interest.

"As you go through it, you begin to realize that there's means to effectively search. If you have a missing person, for instance, and if you can understand their behavior and what they would do, where they would go, you start narrowing it down. So you start with the initial interviews, how, where, why, when, and then you get background on the individual and you come up with some statistics, what's called cumulative analysis. Once you have this cumulative analysis done, you take out your map, grid it off, and you say, 'He or she is most likely to be found in this area,'" Gillway said.

The techniques that the course teaches also cut down on the probability that a scene will be contaminated or that the search conducted will be far less focused and concentrated on a certain location than the situation calls for.

"You don't just say, 'Okay, let's go search this area.' You actually want to do your searches very pragmatically. And the success rate of people who graduate from this school, their success rate in finding people is extremely high, much higher than a person not ever taking the class," Gillway said.

After taking the course, Gillway has even taken time to reflect on some of the searches he has conducted throughout his times as sheriff and admits that with the knowledge that he has now, though the searches were successful, he would conduct them a little differently to make them more efficient.

"A few years ago, we had a search. A man was missing, and we determined that he must have been on his motorcycle out checking cows. It was an evening. I believe it was in November or December. It had just started to drizzle, icy, very cold. When we have volunteers out there, we basically segmented it off where we would send two different teams. I decided that I would send the team with four wheelers into one location. The people who had cars would go to another location, and we'd start checking fields," Gillway said.

Though Gillway and volunteers eventually found the man, who was in critical condition at the time and airlifted to the hospital, he states now that he would have used a cumulative analysis when first arriving on the scene.

"Today, with the knowledge that I have, I may have changed how I searched to make it more efficient. I would have done a cumulative analysis where polling the members that knew the area better than I, knew this person better than I, where are we going to search. Where is the most likely place this man would be? And then once everybody came up with their consensus using the formula, that's where we would focus our efforts. It still worked out very well that night. I'm so glad that we found the man. Now, we can at least have a tool here in our toolbox that we can actually make it a higher probability of finding people," Gillway said.

However, Gillway is quick to point out that the previous search method was not wrong. It was just not as efficient as it could have been.

"What I did before, and Brandon being the Deputy Emergency Manager, along with Civil Air Patrol, our mindset before was not necessarily bad, but now this makes it much more efficient and gives us a higher probability of finding people. So, again, I'm excited about it simply because this makes the IC (Incident Commander), the person leading the actual search, ...it gives them statistical abilities to find people," Gillway said.

One of the more important elements of the course is teaching attendees that if they find themselves off target, they need to reevaluate their methods of searching.

"One thing in this class that they go over is if all of a sudden you're at an impasse, stop and rethink what you're doing. Rethink where your search is, where your statistics are, because they could be way off," Gillway said.

However, even when using the most efficient methods, it is not guaranteed that a person or plane can be found as was the case with Steve Fossett in 2007.

"In October 2008, Steve Fossett had been missing for over a year. They found his wreckage. It was one of the largest searches that the Civil Air Patrol has ever done. And still, no clues. Searched high and low, and it wasn't until some hikers came across the planes wreckage that he was found. National SAR people sort of train just like we are, lots of resources, thousands of man hours used and they couldn't find this aircraft. And so it just, like with the Malaysian flight, they're re-analyzing the data to hopefully find the aircraft," Gillway said. "It took a long time, and it wasn't by searchers finding him. It was just happenstance that a couple hikers found him. It's a big world. Airplanes are little things."

It is for this reason that Gillway trains with the local Civil Air Patrol squadron at least once a month to hone their ground search skills in the case that a plane would be insufficient such as finding a missing person on the ground.

"We try to train at least once a month either in a statewide exercise like we did here this last weekend or a local exercise. We have the equipment. We go out and we train for downed aircraft, but we train equally as hard for missing people. A missing person is much harder to find from the air than what they are on the ground. With ground teams, we can get out there and physically look and see. With an airplane, again, from 2,000 feet up, you look down at that from that altitude and the people on the ground basically look like ants. So they're very important. The training helps us immensely with those situations that do come up where we have to try to find somebody and save somebody's life," Gillway said.

In order to keep local law enforcement and volunteers prepped on the techniques from the SAR school, Gillway has incorporated his training into his conduct with the local Civil Air Patrol squadron.

"Two weeks ago, we had a SAR exercise, and the IC (Incident Commander), Vern Platte, set up this exercise. Now, Saturday morning it was foggy here so they couldn't fly a plane. So we had to figure out our highest probability of finding this ELT, Emergency Locator Transmitter, and we get the map out. We start figuring out where it is that we needed to go. We didn't have a whole lot of details, just that the Civil Air Patrol was going to fly a flight and contact us as a ground team to go to that location," Gillway said. "We look at, every time Civil Air Patrol gets called out, we use the same analysis taught in this class to better, more effectively do a search. Airplanes, aircraft, helicopters cost a lot of money to fly them so you have to narrow that area down. You don't always have a beacon."

Residents will get a chance to see the local Civil Air Patrol squadron and their equipment this upcoming Saturday, June 21, from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Kimball Airport.

"We're having an open house flying in AirLink helicopters going to be there. We've invited basically half of the state. We've sent out fliers to about half of the state, airports, FBOs to come out and see what Civil Air Patrol does and what we do specifically. We've invited local residents to come out and have breakfast with us. There's no cost. We'd like donations if possible, but we're not charging for the breakfast. We're going to have a pretty robust breakfast so we better have a lot of people there or we'll be eating a lot of leftovers," Gillway said.

Residents will also be able to witness several cadets taking their orientation flights with the Civil Air Patrol aircraft.

"We'll have the Air Force there with their security vehicles. The Civil Air Patrol cadets are going to be doing orientation flights that weekend so they're going to be able to get into the aircraft, the Civil Air Patrol aircraft, with a pilot of course. Each one of those orientations is a flight lesson, free of charge. The Air Force pays for this. They get in the plane, and once the pilot is up to altitude, he turns the controls over to the Civil Air Patrol cadet to fly. They actually get a free lesson in how to fly an aircraft." Gillway said.

The flights not only train the cadets, but it also gives them a sense of belonging and instills a desire in them to keep going within the program and serving the public, according to Gillway.

"We train a lot, which is fun, but when these cadets actually get into that airplane and actually fly the aircraft, they come back from their flight and the smiles are from ear to ear and you can just see that they have this sense of accomplishment and they want to continue on," Gillway said.