SAR Starting Point Two

When does Search and Rescue (SAR) start looking for for you? Where do they start looking? How long do they look for? These are three important questions and by understanding the answers, you can greatly increase your chances of survival. SAR Starting Point One answered the first of these, this article takes on the second.

Most people think that SAR teams start looking for you where you were last known to be (last know position), but although this is useful, it's not the case. Quite often, the last known position is vague at best and almost always, you're not still there. The truth of the matter is that SAR start looking where they think you are (estimated position) though this is generally an area and though calculated using a simple algorithm, can involve complex maths, psychology and analysis of the environment; all this is taken over time and re-evaluated in the context of any new evidence. By understanding this method in conjunction with good signalling, you can give yourself the best possible chance of being located, should you find yourself in a situation where you want someone to find you, which let's face it, is rather the goal in a survival situation.

First SAR starts with where you were, then where you were going. They consider route, speed, weather, motivation and "other" and now add time as a factor. A simple example might be a plane which checks in a 1200 with position, course and speed. Having not checked in at 1300, we have a rather good idea about the possible places that plane could be based on a maximum of an hour of travel from a known position at a known speed in a known direction. Of course there are some interesting weather consideration and a few unlikely affectors, but to give the greatest chance of rescue, resources are initially deployed into an area where the plane is almost certain to be, with a probability of about 80%. 

Let's next take this partial Mayday call:

"Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is fishing vessel Polly, Polly, Polly, mayday, BD123 Polly, two miles north of Hartland Point, engine and power fai..." and the radio goes dead.

You may have wondered why the mayday call is in that order; there is a very good reason. From a SAR perspective, the more we know, the better. It would be very nice to know that there were ten people on board, all wearing life jackets and that the there were no medical problems or fires, but if the radio had cut out whilst the casualty (remember, it's just a term) was relaying that, they would have missed the position, which is frankly far more important. That's why it's one of the first things in the call. With only the information above, the coastguard sets to work. An approximate starting position is given. Chances are someone would have mentioned if it was sinking, so it sounds like it's just drifting. The license number will give the coastguard an accurate size and aspect of vessel and with wind and tidal information, a trajectory. If it's going to take 30 minutes to get on scene, then they can have a good idea where Polly will have drifted to. By applying an error factor to all the input variables, a resultant search area can be determined.

Walkers and mountain bikers represent a much more interesting problem when determining a search area, but the same basic principal or position, direction and speed are applied. On Dartmoor, for instance, even the footpaths represent a maze of possibilities for changes in route, let alone areas where going "off piste" is considered the norm. The two principal reasons why recreational walkers don't come back on time is because they are lost, or because there is a medical problem, even if that's simply fatigue.  My plan from the first article gives route and approximate timings for the day, and so if I didn't make it back to the camp site, or more likely, if I didn't check in (which is something I do), then sufficient information would have been given to give a minimal search area over Snowdon. Conversely, someone with no route plan could be anywhere in North Wales (well, not really if their car is found), which is a much wider area to search. Let us suppose we check in at the top. That's a nice last known position and time and with a route set, so I've realistically got to be in the second half of the plan. A quick survey of a few walkers coming off the hill on intersecting routes may give extra info about where I'm not, which is arguably just as important in reducing the search are down.

I recently performed a safety check on a coast path route for a sponsored walk. This was not only to determine the quality of the track, but to gauge progress, chances of getting lost and dangers en route. With this, I gave recommendations for check in points, medical stations and watering areas. This was not only to reduce the chances of a situation occurring, but to give the ability for a swift response over a small search area, which is important when the poor chaps from St John's have to carry all the medical gear up and down the steep paths.

Whilst out with Exmoor Search and Rescue, I was enthralled by the level of detail to which they applied age, gender and history as well as the basics when setting up search areas for despondent and mentally ill "wanderers". With extensive training and statistical backup, they are able to make what appear to be staggering assumptions, greatly reducing the search area giving excellent results.

So what have we learnt here? Essentially, any SAR agency has limited resources and by application of basic principals, experience and some maths, they will determine a search area where they can apply those resources giving the best probability of detection possible. With position, direction and speed as the main contributing variables, the greater the accuracy of these, the less margin for error has to be applied and importantly. the smaller the time window over which the calculation has to be applied, the smaller search the area will be and the more likely you are to be found quickly.

Here are some thoughts on route plans. Have a good hard think about your route and how you imagine SAR teams might try to find you. That will give you some idea of how accurate your route plan should be in conjunction with how often you should be checking in. The more accurate and detailed your route plan, the more likely the SAR agency will assume that you are following it and so tighten the search area around it. The more you deviate from they think you are going, even if this is to try to take a short cut, the more likely it is that you will find yourself outside of the initial search area and so the more accurate your plan, the more important it is to log ad hoc changes. An alternative (or better, a combination) is to log short cuts and "bug out" routes as part of the original plan. If, however, your route plan is woolly or subject to change then state is as such, but then check in more often as this will mitigate the problems caused by an inaccurate estimated position.

Balance route planning with checking in. Always know even roughly where you are. Think hard about the effect of changing route. Know your capabilities and know the capabilities of the relevant SAR agencies and you'll greatly increase your chances of being located and hence increase your chances of survival.

Once again, if you think that all these routes and check ins lack spontaneity, then be aware that the spare paddle bearer will necessarily take longer to find you up the proverbial creak.

In the next article on this subject, I will discuss what happens if SAR don't find you in that initial search area, how long they keep looking, what happens if they find clues, how you can help them if you have no ability to check in, what to do if you do get lost and how best to manage route changes.

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Wet & Dry

I pop on the forums quite a lot and there are many ideas about what should and should not be carried as trail food. Not normally a survival consideration, trail food is more of a preparation; and what do we concern ourself with when preparing for the trail? Weight! To this end, I see a lot of talk about carrying ration packs, dried meals, dry ingredients, partially dried or cured foods and this got me thinking. What sort of food should we pack for the trail? Well, tins and jars are out for a start.

One of the most influential factors in this area is that of provision of water and the most importantly whether or not there is water available at the point where cooking will happen. If no water is available, then you have no choice but to carry it, and that's where we'll begin.

A chap walks for a day on a trail which is not scorching, but has no sources of water available. He takes a couple of litres for drinking, a couple of snack bars, some beef jerky, some rice, two packet soups, a bread roll (acquired from the breakfast buffet at the B&B) and some instant coffee. Like me, he has his coffee black, so no worries about milk or other nasty alternatives. The plan is to much a bit of jerky and the snack bars on the trail, soup & bread for lunch, and a bit of jerky soup with rice for tea.

Jerky is dried and salted and needs extra water to digest, so has some dehydrating qualities, though a little salt intake after sweating is a good thing. Some snack bars are really quite dry also. If we were good trekkers, we would counter this with some extra liquid and so this begs the question, why are we bothering carrying dried stuff at all? Why not carry a nice moist chicken breast and half a malt loaf, I wonder? I know, I know, you can't really have malt loaf without real butter.

Instant soups are super simple because they don't need cooking. A simple introduction to boiling water and you're all done. Hardly any washing up too, just a simple wipe around with the bread roll and it's a very efficient meal indeed. That is, if the roll survives the walk and doesn't become a pancake.

The last meal is rather cunning. Rice and pasta, when cooked from dry need more water to cook than then consume in the hydration, that is, unless you're into pilafs and can get the quantities perfect and not burn it over a fire. Good luck with that. So instantly, we need extra water. The trick with this meal is that the extra water is then not only used to hydrate a bit of jerky, but make a thick soup too. Voilà, dinner. Not much washing up again. Wash out with a splash of water, make a brew and you're set. How could we possibly improve on that?

There is something very simple going on here. If someone took some water out of the food we're carrying, then we're going to have to put the same about back in to eat it. We can't take this out of our drinking ration, since that'll dehydrate us, so we have to carry it as extra. Generally speaking, cooking and washing up needs more water, so the whole business of carrying dried food on trips where there's no water is really a bit of a waste of time. Better to just carry wet food and have done with it. Here's some I prepared earlier.

This is me, particularly late, having dinner in the dark. This often happens on courses in the winter. Note the use of the kettle as the reheating vessel. This is for good reason; I wanted a brew, and as the food was nicely contained, there was no danger of it mingling with my coffee. Two birds with one stone, no plates and no washing up. Decent! Yeah, the portions can sometimes be small, but if you supplement with a precooked rice pouch, then that's a meal right there.

Yes, there was water on site, and so I could have had one of those dehydrated pasta meals, but frankly, they taste awful! I've tried supermarket ones, trekker branded ones (which taste just as bad but cost twice as much), ration packs (no comment) as well as dehydrated veg and stock. Some come with a "make in the packet" option, avoiding washing up, but really, they're pants.

My friend who finds herself all over the world has an interesting diet. What she does is preprepare her own meals and take them with her. She seals them all in boilable bags using one of these units.

As another instructor, she too finds herself eating at odd times in short time periods. She too has tried many options and has found this is the best way of making gluten free, lactose free, other stuff free food and cooking it conveniently.

I'm so getting one!

Anyway, I digress. I'm sure you can see that the benefits of dried or partially dehydrated foods are a bit of a fallacy when water is very short on the trail and this leaves us with one of two conclusions. The first is simply that you might as well take wet food, certainly if it comes in boiler bags and the second is ... why the hell are you not planning your route around water?

So remember, water is a major consideration when carrying food and provision of such is very important from a planning perspective. Ultimately, if you're somewhere where there is no water to be had, you might as well take a nice juicy steak over a dehydrated version, since you're going to have to balance it out with water anyway.


This has got me thinking about trail food in general and I'm presently compiling some research in order to determine the best types of food to be taking should we be able to acquire water en route. Keep an eye out for follow-ups.

SAR Starting Point One

When does Search and Rescue (SAR) start looking for for you? Where do they start looking? How long do they look for? These are three important questions and by understanding the answers, you can greatly increase your chances of survival. This article addresses the first of these questions.

Not long now Mr Frodo

The answer is simple; SAR starts looking when they think you're missing. But when does that occur? It's normally triggered by one of two events. The first is when someone notices that you are missing, worries and reports it. This time has a number of factors.

When I was a child, if I was told to get back at 6, I was back at 6. Conversely, a friend of mine was so poor at time keeping, that it was not be unlikely for him to get back at eight, though he'd not stay out after dark. So, if we'd both been involved in an accident at half five, my parents would have worried half an hour after the fact, but my mate's would have worried some hours later.


So the first factor of when someone worries is all about you. If you're the type to stick to deadlines, then when that deadline has passed, people may notice, if not, then they'll continue to make excuses for you until such time has passed that the situation is considered abnormal.

Where are we again?

But what if there were no deadline? When would people start to worry? If you're the type, like me, to text your partner every day when you're away, then not receiving a message would be a concern. For some, even then an excuse could be made. "It's late, he'll be tired", "he's likely got no signal", "he's probably having fun and forgot". If you're not that guy, then it could be days before anyone noticed. Even not turning up to work can have a day or more of lag before someone decides to call the authorities. 

On a course in the Lake District, I asked the question, "if we hit a survival situation right now, when would someone call the authorities?" The answers ranged from "tomorrow" to "a couple of weeks". Clearly, that time range can have a significant impact on survivability. 

The second reason that the troops come looking is that something has happened, like a plane crash. In reality, this is the same as the above since all that has happened is that the plane has not met its deadline, due to the regulations associated with the laying down of flight plans. The only difference is that the trigger is the plane, not the passengers. 

So what does this tell us, if we want SAR to come looking as soon as possible after we get in trouble? It tells us that we have to set up a system whereby, if a certain amount of time has passed, someone will call someone. This might be as simple as having someone that you check in with every day, without fail and who won't muck about if you don't. Another might be to log a route plan and deadline with the authorities themselves. The police stations around at least Dartmoor, Mountain Rescue, the Coastguard and even the camp site and pub will take a note. I leave one in my car windscreen if I'm hiking. All of these methods will get the wheels in motion as soon as possible.

If you think that telling people where you're going and when you should be back lacks spontaneity, then you have to accept the risk that should you find yourself up the proverbial creek, the the man with the paddle is going to be somewhat later than you might like.

Here's a final note for those on the other end of this process. As a member of a SAR organisation, we'd much rather be called early to a false alarm than late to a crisis, so don't mess around if you really think there might be a problem. 

Igloo Man

Swedish man was/was not trapped in his car for two months/a bit living on only snow, but maybe other stuff

Peter Skyllberg may or may not have survived an ordeal which may or may not have been a miraculous survival story.

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Frankly I don't care if this recent survival story is true or not, but it does raise some interesting survival questions. Let's take them in a pretty standard order of priority; that is to say, let's deal first with the things that would kill us first.

Stuck?


Apparently, he was stuck in the car, under two feet of snow. Well, it wasn't an avalanche, so I have to wonder how he managed to get stuck inside during even the heaviest of snow storm. Might have been worth checking the weather forecast to if there was an indication of such a storm for him to have been so quickly snowed in. Maybe packing a snow shovel would have been an idea. There was no mention of him being knocked out, and even if he slept through his snow storm, it's not beyond the wit of man to open or even break a window and poke your way out. He had to have some form of ventilation, or he'd had suffocated.

Temperature

They say the temperature went down to -30°C, but let's assume that's the press playing the statistics cards. I had a quick look at the statistics for the area and it turns out.

The month of January is characterized by essentially constant daily high temperatures, with daily highs around -3°C throughout the month, exceeding 3°C or dropping below-12°C only one day in ten. Daily low temperatures range from -12°C to -10°C, falling below -22°C or exceeding -1°C only one day in ten.

February wasn't much different. That's not actually that exciting. Yeah, you wouldn't want to stand outside in your birthday suit, but it's not exactly Arctic conditions. Given that the guy had a sleeping bag, we can assume that he also had some sensible clothes too. Pretty good preparation, I'd say.

Shelter

What's immediately apparent about a car, is that it's already wind and waterproof, which is nice. Something else that's useful about a car, is that's it's insulated from the ground rather well, it being not only raised off the ground, but held up by inflated rubber tyres. So far, so good.

My former colleague was quoted in the Telegraph as saying that trying to survive in a car was going to be gruelling, since it was made of metal. If this was an isolated fact, it would be true, since a metal shelter is highly conductive of heat and quickly evens out the inside and outside temperatures, basically, making the inside temperature fall to that of the surrounding environment. I imagine the quote was taken from a quick phone call, which is the normal way the press gets a sound bite for a story.

It turns out, if you have a look at the press photos, that there was a good 50cm of snow on the top of the car and given that he was dug out, we can assume that was covering the whole car. Snow is about 80%, which makes it a great thermal insulator. Snow has a thermal conductivity (k) of around 0.16 W/m K, which is better than brick (0.18), but not quite good as wood (about 0.12) but it's about 7 times better than glass (1.1), 250 times that of steel (55) and 1400 times better than Aluminium (237). We can assume the car had some form of meagre insulation, but we all know how quickly a car gets chilly after you've stopped blowing warm air into it.

Heat transfer is inversely proportional to thickness of material, that is to say that twice the thickness of material yields half the heat transfer and hence half the heat loss over the same period of time. Standard  maximum roof insulation is around 270mm thick, which is around half the thickness of our snow. The materials vary, but it has a conductivity of around 0.04, which if four times better than snow. That makes good roof insulation only twice as good as the snow. So, that's not all bad either.

Other than the igloo and snow hole, another example of snow insulation is that of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 which famously crashed in the Andes and became the subject of a book and the film Alive. Other than the well publicised cannibalism, an avalanche covered the fuselage of the plane, killing nine, but arguably aiding the survival of the remainder.

So, what's heating up the air in the car? Well, as far as I can tell, there was only one heat source available, and that was our guy. We humans emit energy at a rate of about 100 Watts, normally, which is why a party in a small room always get a bit warm. A cheap bathroom heater is about 400W and a car is a rather a lot smaller than even my tiny bathroom. As the air in the now insulated car heats up, we cool down more slowly, so burn less calories keeping warm, unlike standing outside, where we just keep loosing heat to the largely constant temperature air and ground. 

All in all, the snow covered car is not a bad shelter at all.

Fire

Our hapless 'igloo man' was next to a wood. I still don't think he was stuck in it, so I'm going to assume he could have got out. Now let me think ... I'm cold and next to a wood. I know, I'll light a fire. Bit a no brainer. 

"But what if he didn't have anything to light a fire with?" you may ask. Well, other than the quite difficult "rubbing two sticks together" methods, he had a car, and there are loads of ways of lighting a fire with bits of car. More realistically, however, someone who travels out to photograph Elk (as it seems he was) in those conditions, should be carrying something to light fires with. If not, then frankly, get out of my gene pool. That's basic preparation.

Sat by a fire by day, sleep in the car by night. That the most efficient way of keeping warm if you don't have the skills to keep a fire going all night.

Rescue

Our chap was obviously remote and said to be about 1km from a road. This road was described as "main" and there were reportedly hundreds of mapped snowmobile tracks. I don't really understand how he could not have signalled for help or gotten to the road. Either he didn't bother, or he didn't want to get rescued, or he wasn't there for long at all. Hmmm.

Sensible solutions for someone wanting to get noticed from an off road position are signs and smoke signals. That's a blog post by itself, but he obviously missed a trick there.

Water

So, snow, that's water right? Well yes, but it's cold. This chap was said to have survived by "eating snow and ice". Good old Daily Mail, but even the Telegraph alluded to the same. More likely, he would have eaten melted snow, see above for methods of melting. 

What's wrong with eating snow? Well, consuming snow directly means that you have use energy to melt it. Even if we use body heat to melt it in advance, we're still using our own energy, albeit not from the core directly. Even if we let the nice warm air in our car warm it up, we're still taking heat from the air we heated up ourself which we'll then have to heat up all over again we have to find another way.

I'm just going to assume the car wouldn't start, because that would be a sensible way of melting snow, even if you were trapped in the car. Would also keep you nice and warm for a bit. I reckon even a little Fiesta would idle for 30 hours or so on a half tank.

Food

He had a bit of food, but it would have run out. Snow doesn't have any nutritional value, nor does any part of a regular car. So, let's play along with the whole "trapped in the car" lark. What's going to happen here? Well, first we'll consume the sugars stored in muscles and the liver, then we're going to burn lean muscle and fats. The rule of thumb is that we can last about month without any food and make a complete recovery. There are a few contributing factors to this, largely environmental, but also some biological. 

So how did he last that long? Well, I'm going to assume that he had a bit of food kicking around, he kept as warm as possible, he had a little more fat than the average guy and was just one of those people who last longer. 

He was reportedly malnourished, which you'd expect. There is also a possibility that's he's had permanent internal damage, but at least he's alive.

Hibernation

Some sources suggested he went into a state akin to hibernation. Really? Come on!

Escape

This section is left for an exercise for the reader.


All in all, I don't buy it. It seems to be that the chap did not make the effort to try to survive, just curled up and waited to die. Maybe there was something more psychological going on. Maybe he wasn't really there for two months. Maybe he wasn't really trapped in the car. Who knows. It was interesting exploring the possibilities though.

Give some thought to the preparation you might now make, if you risked ending up in the same situation and the actions you might take to get yourself out of the situation in a more timely fashion.