Mike Dugger is working to organize a WFR refresher class that will take place sometime in August. Mike has also offered to organize a certification WFR class this fall if there is enough interest. This class would last for an entire week including the weekends before and after. If you are interested in either class, please contact Mike or one of the officers.

We are coming up upon the summer, which is typically the busiest time of year for us in terms of missions, trainings, and other activities. This means that there are a lot of opportunities to have fun with Search and Rescue.

Boots and Blisters

by Steven Buckley, Training Officer

I just got back from ESCAPE. This year's ESCAPE was interesting. The high point was a demo of the NM SAR parachute team. It was the best part of this year's ESCAPE for me followed by some medivac helicopter demos and a couple of interesting classes. One was on forensic anthropology complete with gory photos of dead people. The other was a climbing primer for ground pounders given by AMRC. Both were great. In addition, I got to hang with SAR folks including sitting down with James for my annual mentoring by the NM State SAR RO. I am back on the straight-and-narrow for at least six more months!

As for the SAR parachute team...I didn't even know that we had one! The ability to insert a SAR person into a remote site is interesting. The most obvious application is to get a medical person into a remote plane crash to stabilize victims and a few "ground pounders" in to help the medic package the subjects for helicopter evacuation. The concept is interesting. The majority of our missions do not require this type of response and even most of the ones that do could probably be met using helicopters. On the low end, SAR teams without specialized air training could be inserted into a clearing near the wreck and then hump it over to the crash site. The obvious advantage of this is that the training requirements are low and the resources are available now. The obvious disadvantage is that the crash site may be several hours hiking from the insertion site negating the time critical advantage of airborne insertion. The next level in my mind is to use helicopters to insert a SAR team deep into the wilderness using ropes to lower themselves down to the site. This is a common method for inserting troops into battle. I got to do this type of airborne insertion years ago when I was a combat engineer in Alaska. The engineers and the infantry recon platoons were the only units authorized to do this training. The recon troops used it to be inserted behind the lines. The engineers had a task to make helicopter landing zones so we trained in it as well. We might even be able to use the Tram to take hours off of a response for missions near the path of the Tram. The obvious advantage of this insertion method is that it requires much less training to properly equip a team to do this. AMRC could do this task today and several of our own people would be able to insert into a SAR scene using helicopters and ropes as well. The disadvantage is that helicopters cruise fairly slowly extending response time for missions a long way from the home airport. The parachute method of SAR team insertion has the fastest response time with associated higher training requirements and mission risk. In any case, the ability to insert a specialized, highly trained (even elite) team into just about any part of New Mexico with a potential response time of 2-5 hours vice 5-10 hours is an interesting, and in my opinion, valuable component of the New Mexico SAR capability.

Anyway, I was disappointed by the fact that Cibola made a limited contribution to this year's ESCAPE short of participation and Chris Murray's Man-tracking class. I offered to work a mock search evacuation for them and Larry Mervine offered to team a search techniques class. We got no takers. I think Cibola can offer ESCAPE a lot and intend to try to contribute more next year. I hope you all feel the same way and will help to make this goal happen. I am trying to put together the 606 helicopter training at one of our local airports. By the time you read this I should have it planned and scheduled.

Our Mock Search is coming up and it is time to get serious about it. Several of you have suggested scenarios for this effort and I have selected one that will really work some areas we don't do often, compliment last year's Mock Search (I have a plan for Mock Searches, really), as well as provide good training for all of the teams. The theme this year is to be a plane crash. The crash will bring in several components that we normally don't work much. For example, I will try to get the New Mexico SAR Support Team to provide the Emergency Location Transmitter (ELT) simulation. We might even get a Civil Air Patrol (CAP) element to kick it all off by "finding" the crash site. There will be simulated deaths with associated body handling practice and possibly Office of the Medical Examiner participation. Of course, I will enlist our moulage team to make the gore seem real. There will be field treatment of badly injured subjects including children. There is even a surprise twist guaranteed to keep the field teams busy. Don't ask me any details on that one...if you want to know then volunteer for the planning committee. I need a few things to pull this off besides help with the planning and execution. First I need large pieces of cardboard. Getting a new refrigerator? Please save me the box. Second, I need dummies, no offense intended. At a minimum a large doll to serve as a dead child and adult dummies to serve as evacuation aids. I will need 1-2 adult dummies. We can always make them ourselves but my thoughts are that we might be able to borrow a training aid. We will also need 1-2 adults to serve as injured subjects and a kid (about 10 years old) to serve as an injured child subject. I am thinking that my daughter Heather might want to do this for us but I need to ask her and get her a "kitchen pass". Finally, I need a couple of older adults to serve as NTSB officials. I have special tasking for them. I am still looking for help with this training program. Please let me know if you can help.

Business as Usual:Meeting Minutes

by Joyce Rumschlag, Secretary

Many thanks to Lili Ziesman and Tom Russo for taking on the secretary job in February and March.

Highlights from the minutes of the 10 April 2003 business meeting

President's Report

Vice-President/Training

Membership

Treasurer

Equipment

Medical

P.R. Committee

New Business

In regard to the call out proceedures: He reasoned that there is a time delay because of the present proceedures. A fair amount of time passes from the time when the tops of the trees respond to the message and when the last person on the tree responds.

Alex Fischer argued that often it takes between 2 and 3 hours for our team to be called initialy, so a few more minutes can't make that much of a difference. Tony Gaier added that people who have pagers know a mission is about to be called because they get all the pages and can began to get ready before the 911 call. He also added that other people with pagers could request not to be called thus saving a call to them from tops of their trees. Stephen Teller countered that some team members do not have pagers or/and have pager problems. Steve Buckley concluded that there is a prompt to get past the messsage to inform the pager handler that the tree is being alerted.

Aaron threw out the question as how we could get all team members to have pagers. Costs were discussed as well as people not wanting to carry two pagers (or even one as the case may be). It was suggested that team pagers could be made available using a plan similar to radios and GPS. New members would get the use of a team pager for six months.

In regard to the Land Nav Eval: Aaron stated that resection is one of the skills evaluated yet seldom used on a mission. Tom Russo argued that the eval is the only measureable way to access our skills in terrain recognition and identification, and marking location our location on a map. A committee was appointed to study possible changes in the land navigation evaluation. The committee will be chaired by Alex Fischer, and includes Aaron Hall, Aidian Thompson, Tony Gaier, Mike Dugger and Steve Buckley.

Also discussed was the possible problem with pets being brought to evals and trainings. It was decided that personal pets would be prohibited at all team functions unless authorized by the Training Officer. That was voted on 13 yes, 1 no.

Aaron thanked Tony Gaier for the excellent night land nav training. It was fun, well run, and offered excellent door prizes.

The meeting was adjourned at 2105.

Who's Who and New

by David Chapek, Membership Officer

Congratulations to our newest prospective member, Tom Rinck. Tom blew through his new member requirements and is ready to be in the field. Look for him on upcoming missions.

Please remember to check your profile on the web site from time to time. This is an easy way to make sure that you're receiving credit for all the trainings and evaluations you've attended. For those folks who have not met their training requirements for the first half of this year, you still have several opportunities before the end of June. Check the calendar and hotline for upcoming events.

Coming Attractions

by Tom Russo

David Dixon has volunteered to take over primary newsletter editing tasks. Thank you, David. I've been proud to have been an editor of this newsletter, but after nearly six years I need to hang up my keyboard soon. I'll be working with David over the next few months to get him up to speed with the tasks needed to get this thing published, and I'll be stepping aside after the July issue.

Public Relations

by David Dixon

The Public Relations Committee keeps chugging along. Last month's meeting was held on the 17th. It was a quick meeting of one. This month's is on May 28th, 6:30 p.m., at the Frontier. The agenda is always the yearly goals with other reports from those present.

A note about summer and later events set up so far. Please put them on your calendar and as always let me know if you're interested in helping.

• August 23, Saturday: Open Space Sunset Chat on Outdoor Preparedness. (No more Fireside Chats because hey, they don't do fires), around 8 p.m., at Elena Gallegos Picnic Ground.
• August 24, Sunday: Host Open Space Hike, around 8 a.m., Elena Gallegos.
• October 18, Saturday: Recruitment/P.R. Talk at Mt. Club Meeting. Sometime in the evening.
• Anytime. Outdoor or SAR Talk. Grades K-Adult.

To those of you who have done some P.R. - good work and keep it up. Please add to my report at the meeting, or email or call me anytime.

Web News

by Tom Russo

I have begun to rewrite the calendar database functions on the web site. So far I just have the functions in place to display existing calendar entries created by the old programs, but I like the new display format a lot better. I intend, when all is done, to make the "view calendar" functions available to non-member visitors to the website as well. This would be the first time the "live" content of our web site would be directly visible to non-members. At the moment the non-member schedule is generated manually by running a program every once in a while that updated a static web page from our database. Once this change is in place we can guarantee that the non-member schedule is always in sync with the calendar.

Sorry, I lied. I just remembered another thing I did this month, updating the "Frequently Asked Questions" page to include a table of mission statistics generated on-the-fly from the missions database when the page is viewed.

Still to be done is the complete rewrite of the medical provider database. That is the one part of the old website that never progressed past the "prototype" stage in the first place, and before I rewrite it I need to meet with Mike and shake out the details of what that database really needs rather than just duplicate the marginal functionality that's there now.

As always, anyone wishing to get involved in website management is welcome to contact me. Base salary of $00,000 per year scaled commensurate with experience.

The team website can be accessed at http://www.cibolasar.org/

Disclaimer and Copyright notice

the Editors

The contents of this newsletter are copyright © 2003 by their respective authors or by Cibola Search and Rescue, Inc., and individual articles represent the opinions of the author. Cibola SAR makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in these articles, and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. Articles contained in this newsletter may be reproduced, with attribution given to Cibola SAR and the author, by any member of the Search and Rescue community for use in other team's publications.