Looking for Info on Search & Rescue

[tygab]

Land based:
I was on a Massachusetts SAR team (volunteer) for a while, and we were an accessory arm to the State Police. All the paid positions were in the PD (or local PD/Fire). There are always people (volunteers) who think their dogs are "made" for it when in reality most pet dogs are not cut out for the work. So, I agree with your thoughts of finding a dog that has already been trained and working on that team.

Urban SAR/confined SAR is very different from outdoors SAR (which is what we did). We were expected to have a 24hr backpack ready to go at all times, and we could be put anywhere they wanted us. All the volunteers had criminal background checks performed, and we had to complete landnav, Incident Command, and SAR II training before becoming full team members. There is a lot of hurry up and wait, because at an incident there is a lot of assessing that goes on before teams get deployed. There are generally two types of searches used at least around here. 1. Hasty - small teams (often the dog teams) that follow a particular path/trail based on likely whereabouts, and 2. line/grid where a whole bunch of people will sweep search an area in a specific pattern for anything. These are slow, time consuming searches, covering whatever is there, meaning swampy, prickerbush, thickets etc are all fair game. What fun! Oh, and at least around here, untrained volunteers are not typically welcomed at searches, because even though people often want to help and mean well, it is not what most think it is. The hasty teams are often the K9 (professional, police officer) dog teams.

Water (for the heck of it):
I was also in the USCG Aux and got SAR training as I worked out of a small boat station and on active patrols in Boston Harbor. This also required knowing incident command. SAR on the water means going in a particular pattern over a particular area - the pattern is decided by the command based on weather, tides, visability etc. Sometimes we'd have helo or fixed wing aircraft overhead as well. The challenge here is it is very tiresome looking closely at water for small objects for potentially hours on end, out in whatever weather. No dogs here, but I learned a great deal from this as well.

For both of these I maintained either an EMT or First Responder cert (later adding a Wilderness First Aid cert). My .02, go through a EMT program, get a W (wilderness) designation to become a W-EMT as well, and then pursue the SAR side. Having the med credentials helps open a lot of doors.

Here are a few good sites to check out:
FEMA (for the ICS training info)
http://www.fema.gov/emergency/nims/index.shtm

NASAR
http://www.nasar.org/nasar/course_schedule.php

and your state's EMS web site.

Edit: And yes, I want to add that doing this is very time consuming. All of these creds require ongoing training to maintain. Which is the main reason I am no longer involved. Maybe someday in the future. It's saddening to know I once had all of these credentials, but I did this all when I had a lot more time on many levels than I do now. Having always had this interest, as a career it always seemed intriguing, but, I didn't see a lot of long term financial opportunity. For example, you can make a little more as an instructor, but even on that salary, it'd be hard to live in this area.