Hi guys! This isn't so much of a practical question as much as I'm just curious. In my area (Pennsylvania, United States), my search/rescue department is an independent department, yet considered part of the fire service in my county. I know in one county in PA (where I actually go to college at), the ambulance department in the area runs SAR up there. I wonder how some of y'all do it and what model is most common (because other places do things differently). Thank you! :)
Most states in the US establish the RESPONSIBILITY for SAR be the local county law enforcement jurisdiction. Who they get to do it is another matter: Very often it is volunteer groups that train for it.
Very rarely is it your own thing (we call that self dispatch, and IC's have nightmares about it).
Police, Fire usually don't do (wilderness) SAR because it is VERY labor intensive, and the police/firefighters involved aren't doing their primary jobs. Occasionally the military assists (helicopters), for missing aircraft Civil Air Patrol is usually involved (not in every state), EMS almost never beyond staging an ambulance somewhere.
I just moved states. In Oregon, it was an adjunct of the Sheriff Department. In Arkansas, it's loosely associated with the volunteer Fire Departments.
In California and Nevada SAR is the responsibility of the county sheriff (unless the county board of supervisors / reps says otherwise, which I don't think they've ever done).
In some cases the sheriff's office / department has their own volunteers or may just call an air asset in to do the whole deal. In bigger counties or counties with lots of sar calls there tends to be private orgs that work under the jurisdiction and authorization of the sheriff's office.
So like for me I'm on a private sar team, we're a 501c3, but we have sheriff badges on our arms, are technically employed by the sheriff's office (and not paid), and drive around in sar trucks with sheriff markings on them. But basically none of us are leos. We have an operating agreement with the sheriff's office where we provide sar services, they don't create another team, we vet people and keep them current on qualifications, they pay for gas, they pay for broken gear, we're on their worker's comp / injury policy, we get their trucks, etc.
9-11 call (or garmin will call dispatch directly) goes to sheriff dispatch, dispatch radios/calls the on-call sar coordinator who's a full time leo that works with us, that person is our incident commander. They call/text the info to our operations leaders who do some homework on the call (usually in less than 10 minutes), and then call out the whole team or a subset depending on what's needed.
As vehicles and personnel go into service they radio into dispatch and then dispatch and the sar coordinator knows what people and vehicles are headed where, from where, and what time they left.
You pretty much described my SAR teams to a T and was trying to figure out if you were one of my local colleagues. The very last bit (calling into dispatch) is the one thing we don't do unless we have one of the county vehicles. Instead all our vollies use Caltopo and Connect Rocket to designate our availability and arrival.
we're on their worker's comp / injury policy
do you fill out a w-99 for this? Are you legally classified as a non-employee contractor and your rate is just 0$?
I honestly don't know. Just know that it's policy and that when guys get hurt (a) on ops (b) on the way to/from ops and (c) on training, they are covered by the county's worker's comp.
You'd know if you were doing a w-99, but that's alright, I'm just curious. It might be a whole category just for liability that lets them extend their worker's comp to non-workers.
Civil Air Patrol is who I do my SAR activities through, we are technically considered part of the Total Force (basically Air Force Active Duty, Reserve, and Guard) however, from a more practical standpoint we are just a group of volunteers with part of the Air Force's budget.
Hello fellow CAPer
You guys have often piqued my interest from across the pond. Are you a professional aviator too?
I prefer being on the ground, however several in my squadron are.
In our state we have local, volunteer, state, and military search and rescue units.
We don't have much at all; the Forest Rangers and Park division technically supervise any necessary searches on publicly-owned land, but it's very flat here and we don't generally have the issues that some other localities have when it comes to "missing people". Here, if you wanna vanish, you go to the city. There's some ex-military out in the rural zones who do fun tactical excursion parties for themselves and their friends, but we just don't have the place to lose people like mountain-forest states too. Cornfields are easy to search, particularly for a dog. TECHNICALLY, despite being landlocked and a thousand miles from any ocean, we have the right to ask the Coast Guard to do it (and they do do operations on Lake Michigan in this nature).
I live in the UK. On land, the police are ultimately responsible for coordinating all search and rescue (as distinct from simply “rescue” which is a fire service responsibility) , but in practice delegate this to volunteer organisations such as Mountain Rescue and Lowland Rescue teams.
In the coastal, maritime, and aeronautical domains, it is the responsibility of HM Coastguard. Our coastguard is neither military nor law-enforcement, it is a civilian emergency service similar to the fire and ambulance services. The coastguard in turn calls upon other volunteer organisations (similar to how the police call upon Mountain Rescue), such as the RNLI.
The difference between the police/mountain rescue and coastguard/RNLI relationships is that the coastguard are overall in charge of the SAR mission and direct any assets they send, and will devise search plans and decide what is sent. It is my understanding that the police don’t do this with Mountain/Lowland Rescue teams.