search-and-rescue research paper

[Kenneth Chiacchia]

Sorry for the late notice (we got some coverage in the P-G and the Trib), but until Byron sent his last email I was having trouble finding this list address (it was among the many that I lost when I was mugged in London, and by some strange mechanism the contact list on my Yahoo account was erased). I thought some of yinz might find it interesting despite the lateness.

Our search team had a paper come out last month in Wilderness and Environmental Medicine, the journal of the Wilderness Medical Society. Briefly, we used a new tool for measuring search effectiveness to get the first solid figures for what ground search teams can accomplish in our local terrain. (Believe it or not, the previous method basically just used guesses to quantify our efforts.)

In addition to being the first publication of such a "sweep width experiment" in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, it also was the first to compare winter and summer results for the same area, and the first to apply formal statistical analysis to the results.

Please let me know if you'd like a copy of the paper, and I'll post it direct to you.

Thanks,

Ken Chiacchia