 Hello, and welcome to another episode of Into the Issues. I'm Steve Pappas. I will be your host. My guests today are Neil Van Dyke, who is the search-and-rescue coordinator for the Vermont Department of Public Safety, right? Correct. Okay. There's a lot of different variables there. And Brian Lindner, who is the representing the Waterbury Backcountry Rescue, right? That's great. You're the team leader. Thank you both for being here. We've been going back and forth on this for a long time trying to get everybody in the same room, and the reason I had wanted to have you on back in the summertime was when there was an incident in Worcester where on Worcester Mountain where there was somebody who had broken their ankle and there was difficulty in finding the right people to get up the mountain at the time and it raised some issues for us at the newspaper, and I thought, well, this is actually a really interesting topic for all Vermonters to kind of get behind, not just central Vermonters, because you all are dealing with some really interesting kind of scenarios and challenges, and in its important work that has changed a lot probably over the over the years, even though search-and-rescue by itself is, you know, pretty straightforward, but talk a little bit, Neil, if you would, about what it is that you do and why do we need this in Vermont? Well, Vermont is pretty well known for its outdoor recreation activities, a beautiful place to go out hiking, skiing, snowmobiling, snowshoeing, and, you know, all of those unfortunately activities at times can, people can get lost or injured, and there's certainly been a demonstrated need for a response capability in the state to be able to provide a public safety service to those recreational users. And this is an extension of what we already see as rescue. I mean, every community kind of has its own, but the specialty is here that you all have a certain skill set that allows you to perform certain duties, as you say, kind of out in the field. Right, exactly. So I think my own background as a volunteer would kind of be an example of that, where I was a member of the Stowe Fire Department and the Ambulance Service in Stowe, and we had a couple of incidents in the late 1970s where people had bad accidents up in Smuggler's Notch, and the response at that point was to call the local fire department and the Ambulance Service, and at that time there really wasn't any specialized training that was available to deal with working safely in those environments. So in that case, that community got together and created what is now Stowe Mountain Rescue to be able to more safely and effectively deal with those types of emergencies. But for many, many years it relied on typically fire department or ambulance service response. Yeah. Brian, it always comes down to everybody, focuses on response time in these cases, but we're talking about response time into some pretty rural kind of often very difficult spaces, and you know, the challenges of that are obviously you're vast, but what is kind of the demand that your teams are seeing in making these rescues? I mean, you're talking about woods, you're talking about way back in the woods. I think to a certain extent we are up against the public's perception that as soon as they call 911, a helicopter and paramedics are going to be immediately dispatched, and in Vermont unfortunately, that's not the case. You're generally looking at hours to be rescued, whether you're sick or whether you're injured or lost. It's really measured in hours. How did you get involved in wanting to do this? I got involved because as an EMT and Waterbury ambulance, we found in the mid-90s that we were being called to some of these rescues where the fire department would empty out the fire department to go up the mountain sides and we park any ambulance at the base waiting for them to bring a patient down so that we had a lack of ambulance and lack of fire protection during these long rescues. So we started looking at Waterbury Ambulance of forming our own team sort of separate from the ambulance to do the rescues, leaving the ambulance in-house, leaving the fire department in-house until the patient is at the trailhead. And how many of these teams are there around the state? There are probably eight to ten, maybe a dozen. Many of them are, as Brian described, embedded into local fire departments or EMS agencies. But where they've been able to do specialized training so that they really have the equipment and training to be able to respond. And Brian, you're a team leader and active in it and you are as well, Neil, but you are in your role as the state coordinator. You're overseeing kind of what all these teams are doing, not the dispatching, per se, but you're keeping track of how many members there are and I'm assuming helping to coordinate them on training? So my role really is, as a state employee, to probably best be described as be the interface between the public or state sort of statutory responsibility and coordinating with these local responses, which are typically kind of first on scene. And we just feel it's really important to have a coordinated response so that each organization knows what's expected of the other and it says we're fortunate in Vermont because we're such a small state. So we all kind of get to know each other, which makes things go much more smoothly. So a lot of my time has been on outreach, helping to provide training and resources to some of these local folks as well as working to enhance the state's capabilities to respond. And these teams are typically centered around mountain bases, essentially. Right. Yeah, I would say that's that's definitely true. That tends to be, if you look at sort of a plot graph of where we get these instance in Vermont, it's pretty clearly along the spine of the Green Mountains. So that's where most of the recreation takes place. Most of the instance take place. And for a volunteer organization to be sustainable, there really has to be enough activity for them to keep interested and keep their skills up. So we have seen some teams that have tried to kind of start up in some of the more peripheral areas. And typically they don't last just because they can go a year or two without actually getting called. So it's hard to sustain. Brian, how many folks are on your team? Officially, we have about 25 and how does it work? If somebody from Waterbury wanted to be part of the team, how do they go about that? What kind of training do they need? And do they need anything before they even come to you? Well, in Waterbury, we're looking for someone that either works in town or lives in town. It's got to be one of the two. And then they can go to the Waterbury Ambulance website and fill out an application there. And while we like to have EMTs, that's not really a requirement because we need what we're really looking for is people experienced in the back country, experienced in hiking, experienced in working in the dark so that when we go out, they're ready for, because most of our rescues are at night time, for example, we need them experienced in being able to go out there. And if we can get them up to the EMT level at some point, that's a bonus. You jumped ahead to one of my questions about most common instances are probably at night. Is there a time of year when you see more instances than others? So we do keep statistics on that. And the highest volume of calls is in the summer and fall. And I think it's strictly a direct correlation to the number of people who are out there recreating. So yes, we see more July, August, September, even into October. And then we'll get another bump in a good snow season with people that are outdoors in the winter. But definitely the summer is busier. Certain kinds of... Well actually, let's differentiate. There's a difference between search and rescue. Let's talk a little bit about that. Sure. So in Vermont, we use the term search and rescue kind of generically to mean a lot of different things. But it is defined in Vermont statute in Title 20 as persons who require, who are lost or missing in the backcountry or motories or waters of the state. So as far as the kind of jurisdiction and responsibility goes, there is a distinction between search, somebody who's lost or missing, and somebody who may require emergency medical care who's in the backcountry. In many states, those jurisdictions are the same. So if you go to New Hampshire, the Department of Fish and Game, the Game Wardens over there are responsible for both of those in Vermont at Split. So in Vermont, the Department of Public Safety has jurisdiction and responsibility for those who are lost or missing. And then people who require medical service but are in a known location falls to the local level. So either a local search and rescue team or local EMS agency or FAR department. So falling back on the instance when I opened the show, I was talking about somebody in this young woman in Worcester who had broken her ankle on the mountain. It was clear that the injury was severe enough that they didn't have to find her but needed the assistance to get her down. And the part of the problem was, one, the time of year, I believe it was hard to get whatever the local, I must say, Worcester, Worcester crew to the trailhead. And two, nobody on the trailhead, nobody from the crew felt that they could actually make the hike up to get her. And somebody else, so one of the backcountry teams had to be called to conduct the rescue. And as you were saying, Brian, that is a response time of hours. That's not a response time of something instant. And do the local departments, can they just, or should they just be yielding and saying, that's backcountry rescue, search and rescue. We probably shouldn't even take that if it's at a certain point on the mountain. I can speak to it in Waterbury, for example, where we have a memorandum of understanding of the fire department that when one of these calls come in, it automatically goes to Waterbury backcountry team so that we are then responsible for that response and the fire department stays in place for fire protection. They don't attempt to do these rescues anymore, like they used to back in the 90s, for example. I think it becomes a more challenging question in a community where you don't have an established search and rescue response like you have in Waterbury and Stowe and some other communities. So I think it's a good question. I don't think there's a simple answer to that in some situations. If the subject isn't too far into the woods, local fire and EMS, they're there quickly. If they have some minimal level of training, they may be able to deal with the response, but I think it's a very good point that they need to understand their limits because we have seen situations where there's been a considerable delay when the initial responders get there and it takes them a lot to figure out that it's really above their capability. Ideally, that would sort of all be thought through and preplanned beforehand as to who's the closest resource who are we going to call. What are our capabilities realistically and what aren't they? Well, one of the other challenges that we're seeing, not just in Vermont but nationwide, is that a lot of these volunteer departments are not seeing the kind of numbers that they used to have. So just by the sheer ability to get people to the scene is probably pretty tricky. Are you seeing that changes in outdoor activity, for example? There's backcountry skiing, there's always been the hiking, but now we're seeing trail running and we're seeing kind of different kinds of sport than maybe we've seen in the past and I'm assuming that with that comes different kinds of demands on the trails and probably different kinds of injuries, maybe, I don't know, more severe without going into the gory details. Has there been an evolution in that or is the person who gets lost or the person who gets hurt, is it usually just a plain old accident or misjudgment and it's not, they were running too fast, you shouldn't have jumped over the crevasse kind of a thing. Well, interestingly, the numbers don't show, I think the numbers do not reflect the increase in outdoor participation that we're seeing. So for example, one of the few growth areas in the ski industry is backcountry skiing. I mean, if you look at sales of equipment and the growth of different backcountry ski areas and zones that are being developed in Vermont, but we really haven't seen a corresponding increase in search and rescue incidents. Not that there aren't any, but sometimes I find a little bit surprising. Mountain biking is another example, so certainly some people fall and get hurt and injured, but it seems to be less than one might expect. So the vast majority of the incidents that we deal with still are hikers. That's the biggest number. If we have a really good ski season, we'll have quite a few incidents with skiers, but they're typically what we refer to as side country skiers, so people who are left-accessed going skiing in a ski area and then ski out of bounds and get in trouble. So certainly a little bit, we're seeing more people participating in more activities, but not to the degree that one might expect, which is a good thing. Yeah, I was going to say that. It probably means that people are actually showing some common sense of being responsible. As far as the searches go, that often is the case of somebody being separated, somebody misjudging the time of the day. You were talking, Brian, about nighttime rescue. That has to be, I would think, the biggest challenge, and especially in a wintertime situation, probably the most panicking kind of rescue that you could be doing. Is that true? I don't know if I would describe it as being panicky, but... Well, you're not panicky. Everybody else around is panicky. Yeah, because we can't be panicky. Nighttime is definitely a challenge, and that's the vast bulk of our calls. For example, we've had 14 this year, only one was started and ended in daylight. But nighttime, that's when we operate. And that's usually hikers? Almost exclusively hikers. This year, for example, yes. Talk a little bit about, so these teams are made up of volunteers for the most part, right? Yes, certainly the local teams are volunteers at the state level. We have some paid folks that do it. But yes, the vast majority of search and rescue work in Vermont is done by volunteers, which is true in most states. So, Brian, how does it work with your team? Do you, even though you're volunteers, there have to be costs associated with this and training? How is what you do essentially funded? For Waterbury, it's privately funded. It's a private nonprofit corporation. Now, the municipalities of Waterbury, Duxbury, and Moortown in the last year have started contributing towards the ambulance. The ambulance trustees gives the back country team an annual budget. And that's how we're funded, plus through donations. And I believe that's the model for most of them around the state. Yes, either private, as Brian said, or many of them are also actually municipal. So they're part of the town government, so either falling under the kind of purview of the fire department, perhaps, which could be a municipal organization. I would say, typically, they also get some funding from the town, but also rely on private fundraising. Do you get anything for rescuing somebody? We have a slip that we give them, or their relatives, that says we're an all-volunteer organization. We're supported through donations, small percentage, reasonable percentage make donations. The majority probably do not. But that's definitely one way that we try and raise funds. I was just going to say it really varies. Some organizations do formal fundraising efforts. Others rely on donations. Brian and I were just talking before the show. There was a family that got lost skiing at Matt River 17 years ago. They send a donation every year to all of the organizations that were involved for the last 17 years. That can be very gratifying that you really realize you've made an impact on people's lives and that they appreciate the effort that folks have gone to. On the other hand, the reality is some people, you'll spend 12 hours dragging out of the woods and they get up, get in their car, drive away, and never get a thank you from them. So that's the exception, fortunately. So there's been this perennial debate argument that maybe we should, as a state, as I'm assuming it would be your department, should charge folks to be rescued. Is that a legitimate debate? I think it's not an uncommon debate to have. It takes place all over the country. I think different jurisdictions have different takes on it. For the most part, I think the position of search and rescue folks, whether either paid professional or volunteer, is that they are generally not supportive of charging for the service that they view it as being sort of a basic public safety, just like you don't get charged. First, if you have a chimney fire in your house, you pay through taxes, you may make a donation to the local volunteer fire department. But the fear is that we don't want people to delay in calling for help for fear of getting a big bill. That's kind of the argument from the search and rescue perspective because the longer things go, the more things are delayed. And generally, the poorer the outcome. So we would rather find out sooner than later, not have people worried about whether they're going to get a big bill and we'll deal with the costs in other ways. So you get the call. Chances are somebody who has been out doing what they're doing is calling you from their cell phone. Two questions there. One is, most people are out hiking to get away from their cell phones, right? But it's also a pretty valuable tool now because it's got so much technology in it with GPS and being able to track. And questions twofold, can it be trusted for what you do? Are you getting an accurate reading of where somebody is? And should people actually be carrying cell phones or smartphones with them when they hike? Well, it's a double-edged sword. It definitely has its advantages. I think it also gives people a certain percentage, a false sense of security. Where we find the cell phone to be most helpful is if they say, for example, they're on Hunger Mountain and we're talking to them and we've got a really good signal in certain ways because of experience, we know generally where they probably are. And it's even more true on camel's hump and I'm sure it is all around the state. The same thing. The strength of their signal in a way gives us a solid clue as to where they are because often they have no clue. That is very interesting. Everyone complains about the cell service in Vermont. That may be the one area where it's like, well, it's a weak signal so we know. Or a strong signal, I guess. But go ahead. So I think it's a good question. I think my feelings about it have changed over time. And I think in large part that's because the technology has changed. And I think telling somebody not to take a phone when they go hiking is kind of silly. They're going to take it anyway. And I think the pros far outweigh the contents. I agree with Brian that there are times when we feel like people are underprepared because they have the safety net in their hand. And they know that help is only a 911 call away. And I think before that technology was available, people tended to think a little bit more about what they need to take to be self-sufficient. Having said that, the ability to get location information much of the time to find out from them what the problem is. So from a medical treatment standpoint, knowing if somebody has a broken femur, a strained ankle, or is feeling chest pain can save us a lot of weight in terms of what we have to carry in and understanding what the urgency is and the speed required and how many people it's going to take. So definitely a valuable resource. As far as kind of the ethical question of being in the wilderness, what our recommendation always is is take your phone with you and put it on airplane mode. So for one thing, you're not being distracted by texts and phone calls. You can use it as a camera and it preserves battery because one of the things that we find is that as Brian said, these calls come in late in the day. People have probably been posting pictures on social media talking to their friends or in areas where there's poor cell coverage, it really burns through your battery and you're just trying to find the signal. So put it on airplane mode. If you need to use it, turn it on and turn it back off again because battery life is a big issue for us. I would say more often than not somebody's phone goes dead between the time they call for help and by the time we're able to get to them and that's very frustrating on our part. So we've got a couple minutes left. What are the things that everybody should have with them now and I bet they're the same things they have always been. But let's see. Brian, I'll start with you. Well, they need to start out by knowing where they've parked their car. It's not the trailhead, at least the town. They need extra clothing. Even when it's 95 degrees, hazy hot and humid, it's going to be cold by the time we get to them. They need food, they need water. The rule in our team is you need to be able to survive 24 hours and come out intact and when we all hike, that's the rule that we abide by. As Brian said, many of these calls could be avoided if somebody had something as simple as a headlamp. The number of calls that we get that I just got dark, I can't see my way down, I think I may have gotten off the trail and really all we end up doing is walking up the trail and walking them back out again. We had an instant up on Hunger Mountain a couple of years ago where somebody went up to see the sunset. That was the intent of their hike on Mount Hunger and didn't bring a flashlight with them. So it's like, what happens when you watch the sunset? Well, the sun goes down, it gets dark. And then we have a response of taking people away from their families at night at dinner time and hiking up the mountain bringing them back down. So a lot of things could be avoided just with kind of common sense. The other two things I would add which isn't so much bringing things with them but telling somebody where you're going and when you expect to be back because to get a call from a family member that a friend went out back on his skiing or hiking and hasn't come back yet, if they don't know where they went, we have chased all over the state looking for people's cars trying to figure out where they are. And that's just, you know, not good use of everybody's time. Well, gentlemen, thank you. One more quick thing. Is there a central website people can go to to get information about backcountry search and rescue? So we have, there is a website called Hikesafe that is a joint program. It actually started in New Hampshire with fishing game in the White Mountain National Forest and the state of Vermont has kind of bought into that and participates in that program. And there's a lot of really good information about kind of hiking safely and some resources on where to go for trail information and that type of thing. And I would say in Vermont the other great resources, the Green Mountain Club, so either calling or going to their website, a lot of great information there as well. Great. Well, thank you, Neil Bandake and Brian Linder. I appreciate your time today. It's been really interesting. Thanks, Steve. And thank you for watching another episode of Into the Issues. Look forward to presenting another show to you again soon. Thanks for watching.