133 Thousands of people living aboard boats posed an early concern, because the storm surge coincided with the highest tide that month, and hundreds of boats were pushed deep into the mangroves. “That kind of search was never done before,” said Mike Zielonka, a captain on Orange County Fire Rescue, Florida Task Force 4 (FL-TF4). “Searchers sent up a drone when they got close to each boat to see if it was even inhabitable. That way we wouldn’t sacrifice a person wading through really hazardous conditions if a search wasn’t needed.” FL-TF4 focused on large liveaboards, ranging from billiondollar yachts to shrimp boats, conducting hundreds of searches in hard-to-reach places. Zielonka and team used postimpact aerial images to drop way points indicating the next boats to search and forwarded a live map to teams that spread out by boat and bushwhacked through mangrove thickets. “The map helped us make sure we covered our bases so we could be very accountable for the areas we searched,” Zielonka said. The FL-TF4 team and more than 20 other search and rescue teams used a suite of tools called the Search and Rescue Common Operating Platform (SARCOP) to collect more than 108,000 field observations. The toolset enabled them to segment search areas to be covered in 12-hour shifts, show tracks where each team had been, and drop icons to indicate what was found or done. The situational awareness gave each team as well as coordinators at the state and federal levels the means to stay informed and adjust quickly to cover places where people might be found. “It made for a better use of teams, not duplicating efforts,” Zielonka said. “I have a long list of the names of the storms I’ve been to over the years, but as far as severely impacted coastal areas, Fort Myers, south Sanibel, and south Pine Island had the most damage I’ve ever seen. The storm wiped the sand clean of structures, leaving behind just piles of sticks.” People, Process, Technology SARCOP has been 10 years in the making, with a team made up of GIS practitioners from the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS (NAPSG) Foundation, funding and support from the US Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology (DHS S&T), FEMA, and solution engineers from Esri who refined the toolset over the course of many disaster events. SARCOP takes a people, process, technology approach to search and rescue. It pulls together ArcGIS mobile apps— including Survey123, QuickCapture, Field Maps—and ArcGIS Online in a wrapper built with ArcGIS Experience Builder to capture search and rescue workflows. SARCOP provides a system that’s ready to go, works right away, and is designed for use throughout a wide-area-search incident, such as floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. “There have been a lot of smaller deployments, like in Texas where they used SARCOP more than three different times in 2022 for wildfire, tornadoes, and flash floods,” said Paul Doherty, emergency management specialist (geospatial) at FEMA. “Those no-notice events are important because there is less time to prepare, so having a common system ready to go really makes a big difference for first responders.” For Hurricane Ian, Florida’s whole US&R system adopted SARCOP for the wide-area search that took two weeks. The local adoption is a key to the success because each disaster starts and ends locally. FEMA coordinates with others and lends support, but it doesn’t lead the response to disasters. Over the years, FEMA has invested in SARCOP and worked alongside the NAPSG Foundation, the International Association of Fire Chiefs, and others to create a common platform to enable all search and rescue responders who don’t have the ability or funding to build something like this themselves. Jared Doke, who works closely with Doherty as a program manager for the NAPSG Foundation through a grant from DHS S&T, explained efficiency gains and how the tool has evolved. Public Safety
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