134 Several years ago in Louisiana, we had a state team and a federal team that were drawing search and rescue segments over each other, going to the same places, and we didn’t know that until the data started showing up. Before we had the ability to draw segments on a map, teams were overlapping, not knowing others were there until they’d bump into them on the streets. —Jared Doke, program manager at NAPSG Foundation During 2023 recovery events, with SARCOP adopted by more teams, the search was done much faster because there’s little overlap. “You can spend a lot of time just asking someone where they are, but when you can see everyone on the map, it removes a lot of that time-consuming chatter,” Doherty said. “Hurricane Ian was a breakthrough for us, because we had, in one map, live tracking of both federal and state teams across a wide area.” US&R Incident Support Lexi Passaro deployed to Florida for Hurricane Ian as a situation unit leader on FEMA’s Blue Incident Support Team, which coordinated US&R operations, including strategic and tactical planning. She has been involved with SARCOP’s evolution, using a predecessor tool and then the 2022 iteration on missions to the Champlain Towers building collapse in Florida, floods in Kentucky, and now Hurricane Ian. “In just a year, it has matured and evolved,” Passaro said. “We came up with an intel cell concept, which is even now maturing into a Search and Rescue Intelligence Group concept. When the data and imagery is combined with human intelligence and remote sensing like unmanned aerial systems images, video, thermal imaging, and other technologies, we can make science- and data-based decisions on search planning. The technology has been there for a while, but now we’re getting to use it in more beneficial ways.” Members of US&R task forces are certified for their skills, such as structural collapse, wide area search, swiftwater rescue, confined spaces, hazmat, and other specialties. Passaro relishes her role as a “translator”, to analyze data and information coming from SARCOP and distill it into an informed search plan the Incident Support Team then uses to guide specialists. “A lot of our members are very skilled at technical rescue, which involves power tools to break and cut concrete, which is really hard hands-on work,” Passaro said. “These are folks Some of the first evidence of storm damage is collected from a crowdsourcing cadre of #PhotoMappers from GISCorps who take images posted on social media and place them on a map.
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