When a series of bad storms that battered Southern California recently caused a catastrophic landslide in the city of La Conchita, search-and-rescue teams hoping to find survivors had a host of high-tech tools at their disposal. So, too, do teams looking for people caught in avalanches.
And while the most important factors in finding people alive in such disasters are quick thinking, sufficient manpower and eyewitness accounts, technology is a major piece of the puzzle.
Sgt. Tim Hagel, who was one of the leaders of the Ventura County Sheriff's Department's search-and-rescue efforts in La Conchita, said his team relied on a combination of heat-seeking and sound-sensitive tools to try to find people.
According to Hagel, rescuers there used thermal imagers, known as forward-looking infrared, or FLIR, to try to detect the body heat of people trapped under the rubble. He said that the devices were used both in the air -- on helicopters -- and on the ground.
The airborne units, he explained, are mounted underneath the helicopters, and are about the size of a bowling ball. Controlled from within the aircraft by someone with a gyro-stabilized joystick, the devices can sense body heat from up to 1,000 feet above ground.
At the same time, Hagel said, his team used handheld units resembling radar detectors in a much more localized manner, pointing them directly into open spaces, or voids, in a rubble pile. But the smaller units do the same kind of work.
"The handheld units are the baby brothers of the large ones that are on the helicopters," Hagel said.
Still, he explained, the FLIRs -- which are evolved from NASA technology used on space shuttle missions -- are only useful if the person handling them knows what the image on the device's display means.
"A thermal imager is only as good as the operator," he said.
Hagel said his team also utilized military-style listening devices in order to try to hear sounds from anyone alive under the landslide.
He described the devices as small, amplified microphones attached to lengthy cables that are lowered into the voids. And whenever a sound is detected that might be a survivor, all work on the site has to stop, a process that happens a few times every hour and which takes about 30 seconds. Most such instances turn out to be nothing.
"We're used to it, because we're trained for it," Hagel said. "False positives like that aren't frustrating because they're just a way of life. It could be the one, you just don't know."
Hagel explained that someone -- he's not sure who -- donated a ground-reading radar to the La Conchita rescue efforts. That's a device, he explained, usually used by geologists in oil fields or by military personnel looking for mass graves.
The idea of the radar units, which he said cost millions of dollars and are not generally used in search-and-rescue operations, is to try to find voids in the rubble.
In this case, he lamented, the tools didn't work, as the ground was too liquefied.
"The moisture in the ground itself was absorbing the signal," he said.
In mountain searches, like the one recently concluded in Utah, rescuers use a different set of technologies to try to find lost or trapped people.
According to Steve Lewis, the director of Juneau Mountain Rescue in Juneau, Alaska, the most common technologies on a scene are GPS equipment, compasses and LED headlamps
Still, he said that he'd recently come back from a mountain rescue conference and had seen some new technology he felt would be useful in trying to rescue avalanche victims.
In particular, Lewis said, he was excited about radar-reflective material that clothing manufacturers may soon begin sewing into winter jackets. Thus, he said, rescue teams with radar equipment may be able to locate those trapped under snow more quickly.
And that's important, he said, because heat-sensing equipment is mostly useless in finding people trapped under snow.
"Snow is such a good insulator," Lewis said, thermal imagers are "just not going to work."
Lewis also said he is impressed with avalanche beacons such as the Pieps DSP, which emit extremely low-energy beeps that can be received by another such device. The idea is that back-country skiers all wear them in case of getting caught in an avalanche.
"The digital signal processors they put in these (devices) are just going to be a lifesaver for a lot of people," Lewis said.
Less exciting but equally useful might be search-and-rescue software such as Incident Commander from Sar Technology.
Martin Caldwell, the company's founder, said the software is useful because it can help rescue teams figure out which areas of a disaster site are most likely to have survivors, and thus, where to devote manpower. He said the software has been used extensively all around the world, including by the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the Columbia space shuttle disaster.
