Questions and answers: Experts illuminates the difficulty of finding children who are missing in the forest

After a six -day search for two missing children who have been completed this week in Pictou County, an expert for lost people shed light on the difficulty of finding children in the forest.

Lilly Sullivan (6) and Jack Sullivan, 4, have been missing since May 2, when the police received a 911 call, in which they reported that they had moved away from their house in the Gairloch Road in the Lansdowne station, about 25 kilometers southwest of New Glasgow, NS,

The police announced on Wednesday that after six days of hundreds of volunteers who search the heavily forested areas around the house, gave no signs of the children and it is not likely that they are alive.

Robert Koester, a coordinator for search missions that the Ministry of Emergency Management in Virginia in the United States, wrote the book Lost Person: A search and rescue guidelines for appearance – for land, air and water. He also created an app called Lost person Behaviour used by seekers in the Lansdowne station.

Koester has collected a database with half a million search and rescue incidents from all over the world and put them together in a database with which he creates statistics.

He said CBC News that he could not speculate about the search for Lansdowne Station, but made general comments based on his data.

This conversation was processed for length and clarity:

What do the searchers have to miss in a rural, four -year -old and six -year -old child in a rural, forested area?

The first is the beginning of a good solid investigation: the age, the scenario, where they were last seen when they were missed, what the timelines they missed? Usually there is no possible scenario, but several possible scenarios that can be taken into account. And by scenario I mean that they could have gone … they could have been hurt, they could have got sick, even though two children would get sick at the same time, would be much less likely. They could have entered a water feature if water features are a possibility, and a criminal scenario is always a scenario. All of these things have to be taken into account.

Usually the next one is when you know that the age group can look at some basic statistics, as is usually the extent to which four to six year olds are generally lost when they are lost. Half of the four to six year olds are removed within half a kilometer.

75 percent [of children] are 1.2 kilometers away. … If you want to go far enough to find 95 percent, there is a dramatic leap because you now start to achieve more outliers, and this number is 6.6 kilometers away, which drastically increases your search area.

And what about the forest conditions? This area has really dense undergrowth and fallen trees, and it is almost as if you can't even see through the forest when you try to look. How could the children go back to how far?

This sometimes limits the data, but in a kind of surprising result there is also a lot of my data from the Northwest of Pacific, i.e. Oregon, State of Washington, British Columbia. And they would think that these thicker forests could slow down people, but in fact they go a little further than in the eastern vegetation.

Certainly the people in Virginia, where I am stationed from summer, do not go that far in summer because of all the thick vines and thick vegetation. So it is always taken into account, but the data includes all of these cases.

I saw [your app includes] Survability for children who are missing. Can you go through this based on the time you are missing?

If you find a child in the first 24 hours, your chance of survival will be pretty good. In fact, 98 percent are found alive when they are found in the first 24 hours. Deaths tend to drown. If you only find them after two days, it falls to only 33 percent that are found alive.

You will occasionally get some of these miraculous finds. What my diagram does not take into account is temperature and weather. And obviously temperature and weather will have a major impact on the actual survival.

So this search … THey called the search and rescue section after six days. When do search processes normally call this part of the operation?

I imagine you didn't call it up, but you have suspended the search. And if there is new information, you will certainly search again. It turns out that the average time of a suspended search is only one day. This is an average, some search queries will take two days, some will take a week. Depending on the circumstances, everything is obviously a little different. But if they went for a week, they were certainly much longer than the average.

And how often are there any clues? These children left no trace. [RCMP said] They thought they saw a boot print and then there was nothing else. How often is that?

Most search queries will therefore have at least one or two information. I have certainly carried out searches without hints, the only hint was the last place where they were seen, and then we find the topic. So it's really difficult to say. It also depends on it, you know, have you trained trackers? We usually call a dog alarmed a hint.

I saw both – I find the topic without hints and have a lot of information and never find the topic.

How often do you never find the topic alive or a body?

Well, never finding the topic that we would call a search for searches that occurs in the database.

You mentioned to pursue dogs – how often do you not start fragrance?

This is difficult to evaluate, because to give a real percentage, you have to know how often you have caught the fragrance, how often you have not caught the fragrance. And then was the more important part of the equation, how often was there fragrance to catch? You won't catch a fragrance if the topic is not there.

You can also miss the fragrance if the wind blows the wrong direction, the dog has a cold … no resource is absolutely.

And they mentioned at the beginning [of the interview] That crime is sometimes involved. What percentage of the time is that the case?

So when it comes to my database when it comes to an urban search, there is four percent of the time crime. If it is a wilderness or a rural search, it is a third of one percent, so relatively rare.

How high is the chances that the drone will not pick up heat or the person will not find if it is in the forest?

The two primary sensors used are therefore an optical camera and the second is an infrared sensor. Both sensors must be able to see the floor. In other words the [tree] She stops the canopy. Easy to understand how Canopy stops a visual sensor, but it turns out that the infrared heat is also stopped by leaf cover.

The second part is the visibility of the motif … For a normal camera, if there is a high contrast, it is a pretty good chance to see it. If there is a low contrast, it is very difficult to recognize even without a canopy. And for the infrared, which in heat patterns, you know whether you are strongly hypothermic and at the same temperature as the environment, then there is hardly a chance to be discovered. If you are under the canopy, you will not be discovered either.

And how often are animals involved in wilderness or rural search queries? Are there any animal attacks that are the cause of the missing person?

That is rare. This is extremely rare, especially for two people. However, I see it in the database, but you know that if there was an animal attack, it was usually something like a mountain lion with a single person who was out there. The typical scenario for an animal attack was early in the morning or in the late afternoon, with a runner running alone on a wildness trail and running a kind of trigger that attack the phase of an animal.

If a person who is sought is never found, what are the causes usually? Or can you ever know the causes why they were not found?

I did a bit of a study. One of the reasons is that they went outside the search area so that the search area never reached them. A second reason was that a team was assigned, but did not go where they were assigned. This is pretty rare these days with GPS.

Another reason is that you take a separation in the area during the search, so that you do not cover this specific part of the territory. And the last reason is that it can only be damn difficult to recognize people in the forest. All it can take is one or two seconds in which you can look to the left if you are looking for the right to recognize the topic. Especially in children, they can crawl to small, narrow places that are hidden from the field of vision so that they are very difficult to find.

What does your app and your research do? Are you looking for searchers that you should pay attention to when are they children? What is different if you are looking for children?

Probably the trademark with children, even if you scream your name, may not be shouting because you may have said that you shouldn't speak to strangers, or you are just afraid of them, or they have an active imagination and they have converted them into bigfoot or something.

You may think you are in trouble. So you can actively hide from searchers. And we certainly point out that children will crawl into thick undergrowth. It can look impenetrable for them if the adult seeker who is five feet. But if you are between one and three foot down, you can see a way to crawl under the brush and crawl into that. And this thick brush can provide the child a certain amount of protection. All of these places must therefore be searched. And that's a very difficult, time -consuming search.

How does your app help the seeker?

Well, there are some of these distances to you how far you should look. It gives them percentage chance that they will go uphill or downhill. You give you … a kind of checklist where you should first search for where you should set your priorities.

There will be a tactical briefing to the actual field searchers, so this is what you should look for. Thick brushes and briar are important. Hiding are important. The topic may not answer you, so don't rely on it. This type of details would be in a field information that is in the app.

And just the last one before I let you go, is there something you want to say about this special search?

My heart always goes to the family and my heart also goes to seekers who really pour everything into a search, especially for suspicious children.