BY BRIAN L. HUCHEL
DANVILLE — It’s two of the most ordinary things in the world — a broken stick and a footprint. To most people, neither item offers any significance. But to members of Vermilion County’s Special Tactics Search and Rescue Team that print in the dirt and piece of nature speak volumes.
Called in when people go missing, the team uses a combination of nature and numbers to determine where a person has gone.
Footprints offer everything, according to Richard Copass, a tracker on the team. What a person is doing, what they’re thinking and even how tired they are come across by studying a footprint. A person can leave as many as 2,000 foot prints in one mile.
Even without a footprint, dew-covered grass that has been trampled under foot can give a direction of travel. The same goes for branches that have been pushed out of the way.
“If you find a good direction of travel, you want to eliminate the rest of the world,” said Copass, who is an eight-year member of the team along with his wife, Marsha.
The Special Tactics Search and Rescue Team wants a fast resolution in any search situation, trying to get into the field within 30 minutes to begin searching. Upon activation by the Vermilion County Sheriff’s Department, anywhere from three to five team members will begin to look for clues to point the team in the right direction.
It can be a down and dirty job, according to Jody Legett, another tracker who said she will get down on her hands and knees to look for clues.
“Sometimes some of the signs are a little less visible, such as a scuff mark on the moss on a log, a newly broken twig or a stone pushed in the dirt,” she said. “There’s numerous clues, but it takes a lot of patience and efficiency and accuracy to find them.”
The team will work for as much as four hours on a search before bringing in the larger team county search and rescue team. The special tactics team then plans the next move for the search.
The special tactics team recently went through its paces after four 13-year-old girls wandered away from a Bismark school picnic in late April at Kennekuk County Park. The group was found hours later with officials believing they wandered around for almost 10 miles.
Ted Fisher, director of the Danville/Vermilion County Emergency Management Agency, organized the group about five years ago as an offshoot of the Vermilion County Search and Rescue Team to handle the increase of modern technology and in-depth training in the field.
Several of the team members have several thousand hours of training, up to national level search and rescue from the Air Force and the Coast Guard.
But the search tactics involve more than just examining a twig or looking for footprints. Part of the training involves hours upon hours of working with math formulas and statistics to ensure trackers are looking in the right place for clues.
Numbers have been collected over time, including in Europe, Canada and Australia and dispersed to search and rescue groups like the special tactics team. The numbers, when worked into patterns show patterns as to the actions of certain missing subjects.
A 19-year-old man, like the Bismarck girls, is more active and may travel farther than most, Fisher said, while small children will tend to not go as far and prefer to hide under things and not answer to people yelling for them.
Alzheimer’s patients, oftentimes the subjects of searches, tend to walk until they hit a barricade such as a river, water or briars. Then Fisher said they lay down.
The statistics are so specific as to even separate the characteristics of deer hunters and how they react compared to mushroom hunters.
“So there’s different things for different people,” he said.
But even numbers can be wrong sometimes. Fisher pointed out the foursome of Bismarck girls walked well out of the expected range, even though they were simply wearing flip-flops, and crossed a fast-moving creek — also an unexpected move.
“We don’t stick 100 percent to the statistics,” he said. “If you do that you’re going to miss a few. You can’t base it all on stats. They’ll do the out of the ordinary, too.”
Fisher said notes are made in local statistics whenever a search subject strays from the expected actions.
The numbers and probabilities of where a search subject may have wandered are not lost on the trackers that head out search for clues.
“You never know what a lost person is going to do,” said Legett, a team member for seven years. “We keep the stats in mind when looking.”
And although it would seem a wide open space like Kennekuk County Park is a daunting place to search, Fisher said it’s actually the urban areas that are more difficult. He points out the additional number of places a person can hide as well as barriers such as coming across private property.
While the actions may differ at times, the interest remains — not only in finding the person safely, but figuring out the path they took.
“It’s the world’s biggest mystery to find out where this person went,” Fisher said. “You have to come up with everything yourself. You start from the last point seen and go from there.”
