« Managing an Emergency | Main | Detroit or Bust! »
USAR
August 30, 2005
Being the inquisitive person that I am, I’ve been watching CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and The Weather Channel off and on for the past 48 hours. Interviews, phone calls, live and taped video all over the TV. Some call it “hurricane porn.” I call much of it informative, other parts I call excessive. I particularly like the interviews with Army and FEMA officials, the ones really in the know about what’s going on.
Today I happened to catch a short phone interview with a member of the Fiarfax County USAR Team - Virginia Task Force 1. USAR teams often travel across the world helping in naturual and man-made disasters, mostly in searching through rubble for survivors. Naturally, my curiousity led me to the internet and the question - “Does OKC have an Urban Search and Resuce team?” According to USAR.org, “The Home of Urban Search and Rescue”, we don’t.
Being in tornado alley, I’m actually quite surprised that there isn’t an official USAR team here. Yes, I know that the local fire departments have experience in disaster response, but why don’t they have an official, statewide, specific USAR team?
Here are the states that have at least one team:
Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Ohio , Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.
The closest team is in Texas, based at Texas A&M (Why? I don’t know). Also noticably missing from the lists is Illinois (Chicago).
The typical USAR team is broad in membership, but specific in scope. The list of members, taken from VATF1.org, goes like this:
The team is comprised of emergency managers and planners, physicians and paramedics and includes specialists in the fields of structural engineering, heavy rigging, collapse rescue, logistics, hazardous materials, communications, canine and technical search.
I’d really think that OKC or a state agency here in OKC should think about starting an USAR team. I’d love the be part of that team too. (Part of the reason I searched for info the begin with.)
Posted by paul at August 30, 2005 01:07 PM
Comments
Christa said on August 30, 2005 04:28 PMI agree - you should get on that!