As members of a search and rescue team it’s important to continually fine tune your craft. So, when the TEEX Wide Area Search class was offered by the Gadsden, AL Emergency Management Agency (EMA) we decided to put a few of our team members through the class. A little about TEEX From their website: “As part of the National Domestic Preparedness Consortium and home to the National Emergency Response and Recovery Training Center, TEEX has been leading homeland security training since 1998.” Their Wide Area Search class is geared towards incidents that cover a large geographical area with an unknown number of victims, such as hurricanes, tornadoes and plane crashes, but the search principles can be applied to just about any SAR event. Over a period of 3-days we learned how to prepare, respond, plan, map, search, communicate, manage a team, brief and debrief. I can’t say enough good things about this class and the instructors if you’re involved in search and rescue - at any level. If you’re interested in taking the class, contact TEEX or have your local EMA set it up. The class is free and well worth the 3-days of time spent learning the skills. And even if you just want to volunteer during a disaster, if you learn these skills it will make you much more valuable to the responding teams.
