Mountain & lowland rescue
The search and rescue teams on the ground – tackling rivers, rocks and ravines – form the backbone of the land emergency response
A broken ankle and no phone signal can quickly turn a gentle hill walk into a deadly trek; as the night draws closer and the temperature drops, the ground search and rescue teams are responsible for finding those who have gone missing on land.
Whether you’re scrabbling through a cave or traversing a field, you can’t carry a giant case with you equipped with everything you need, and the further off the beaten track you stray the harder it becomes to carry equipment. The work for land rescue is much more about relying on your senses and keeping equipment light, so these SAR teams are highly trained to use their observation and intuition and will usually find clues that will direct other searchers as they scour the area.
Search on foot
Searching on foot is almost always the first plan when a person is reported missing. After gaining some information about the missing person, such as their last known location and what clothes they were wearing, a map is divided into search areas before the teams organise themselves. Grid searching is what comes to mind when you think of the hunt for a missing person; a long line of volunteers walking across open fields examining the ground. A trained grid search team can cover approximately 1.6 kilometres in 3.5 hours by walking slowly and deliberately and taking time to survey each bush and debris encountered for vital clues.
The other main type of searching, known as hasty searching, is almost the opposite. As the name suggests, hasty searchers work so fast they are almost jogging, and they explore vast areas and check the most obvious places where a missing person may have been wounded or stopped to rest, such as cliffs, ditches and caves. The teams at UK SAR are trained to identify tracking signs including broken branches and
“A trained grid search team can cover around 1.6 kilometres in 3.5 hours as they search the area for vital clues”
footprints, but when the terrain gets more difficult they can use equipment such as bikes, kayaks and boats to continue their search.
communication technology
There is some equipment that will always come with a search team, despite the difficulties carrying it on a search. Gary Mitchell, surface support in the Tham Luang cave rescue, spoke to
How It Works about the technology they used. “In any rescue we need to know exactly what is happening underground and where people are and in what direction people are moving, and ‘heyphones’ were one of our staple pieces of equipment.”
Heyphones are commonly used by cave rescue teams, in addition to the more standard VHF radio used by ground rescue, as the low frequency is able to penetrate through rock and deep into the ground using induction loop antennas or electrodes in the ground. Communications become even more important when the missing person is found but isn’t in good health. “You need instant comms so you can know the condition of the casualty – if they’re getting better or if they’re deteriorating.”