The loss of a loved one is a real tragedy. Latvia, where I live, is a small country, but every year we have a lot of people going missing.
Fortunately, many are found on their own, some are found by the police, some remain on the missing list. But sometimes it becomes necessary to search for a person with the whole world - for example, when someone gets lost in the forest. There is a volunteer organization in Latvia whose volunteers are engaged in such searches. On the website of the organization, I filled out an application form,
I was accepted as a volunteer candidate, and a few days later I was invited to a training session to find people lost in the forest.
The training took place in a forest near Riga, at an abandoned military training ground.
There are quite a few newcomers. First, each of us had to introduce ourselves and briefly tell about ourselves. 
Then they explained the task to us - "lost things" are hidden in the forest, which we have to find. Cynologists with search dogs are the first to go on the route. Two dogs arrived today - Akita Yule and Border Collie Jay. 
When a search dog finds a person or an object in the forest, it marks its find with a bark and lies down next to it.
Of course, the dog is not looking for a person, but for the reward that is due to her for the find. For Yule, this is a treat, and for Jay, it is a favorite toy.
While the dogs are working, we are divided into groups and given cards, where each group has a search square. 
Each group is assigned an experienced instructor. First of all, we are all treated with a remedy for ticks and reminded that it is advisable to have drinking water with us, because our main task is to return home unharmed. Then everyone is given a bright red armband and a pole with a red flag - search participants must see each other and have an identification mark. 
We are taken to the starting position and the groups are divided into sections. For the search to be effective, it is necessary to comb the forest with a chain. We are lined up. You need to remember your neighbor on the left and the neighbor on the right. 
And henceforth, everyone must strictly adhere to his place in the line and keep his distance. Finally, the dogs have finished their work in the forest, and we are given the command to start moving. And then it turns out that walking in a chain is not so easy! You must go slowly, carefully examining everything around you, and at the same time you can neither overtake your comrades, nor lag behind them. If someone is even a few meters behind, the whole line stops and waits. 
Otherwise, you might miss something important! It is necessary to fix any object that should not be in the forest - be it a candy wrapper, a handkerchief or a shoe print. 
Since we are walking along an abandoned free range, we have a lot of natural and artificial obstacles in our way - pits and hills, old dugouts and hangars. All this must be carefully examined - a person can be in a pit or on the roof of a shed. But everyone must go strictly on their own line. If on the way someone, for example, has a dugout, it is examined by the person on whose line this dugout is located. The rest stand in their places and wait until the law inspection begins. Then they all start moving forward together. And in this photo, everyone is happy - the neighboring group found their "lost"
I was always worried that our lost child would be on my line, and I would not see him. Actually, that's what happened. The man was sitting on a tree (there are only pines around, and suddenly there is a maple) and was practically invisible among the leaves. He later told me that I looked at him point-blank - and did not see! Probably, I would have passed by, but my neighbor, a guy who served in the army, noticed his peripheral vision. He said, an army habit, he walked and looked out for a sniper.
Of course, I was upset, but at the "debriefing" everyone comforted me and said that point-blank is really almost impossible to notice a person in the foliage, you can see him better from the side. And what is strange is that people go to the forest for mushrooms and dress almost in camouflage, turning into an invisible man. But such clothes are good only when you need to pee discreetly in the forest. Please wear something bright when you go to the forest, especially for children and elderly relatives!
Don't lose each other!
We often encounter the fact that an ordinary person, who is not related to the rescue business and does not encounter it in practice, has a very idealistic idea of the extent of this problem and the ways to solve it.
So what's the first thing that comes to mind ordinary person in response to the question "how to search?".
Drum roll ... Well, of course, determine the position on a mobile phone (if, of course, the lost one has it).
Myth 1. Lost can be found by mobile phone.
Let's see, is that right? First of all, we will face the remarkable problem of our legislation. Data on the location of a mobile phone is protected, as well as the secrecy of negotiations. This means that you can get them either through an official request from the Ministry of Internal Affairs / FSB / Prosecutor's Office, or if it's a little easier, if the lost phone is registered to you.
No rescue services have the official right to receive this data ... (surprised? yes, it is).
Let's imagine that we magically received the long-awaited numbers from the mobile operator. What will they give us?
The cellular operator will be able to tell you from which base station and through which antenna your lost person was talking.
In a city where the density of base stations is extremely high, this would allow determining the location (location area) with an accuracy of hundreds of meters. In a forest area, you will most often get a sector of 120 degrees and up to 30 km long (about 1000 sq. km). In 90% of cases, this only allows us to confirm that ours is really lost somewhere in this forest.
Myth 2. You need to look for him with a dog ...
Of course, this assumption is quite realizable, if not for one BUT. A dog that can really help in such a situation needs to be prepared for a long time and carefully. The training period for cynological calculation for forest searches is at least 2 years of intensive work. Moreover, forest searches have their own specifics and service dogs are simply not suitable for this work. It seems to be not a myth, but specially trained search and rescue and, moreover, tracking dogs for natural environment very little. And most importantly, dogs never give a guaranteed location. Often, as a result of work only appears Additional Information(“He was not here”, “He was there”) and only the competent use of this information by rescuers allows us to get closer to a happy ending.
Myth 3. A wizard in a blue helicopter will fly here ... and find everyone
Let's imagine that, in an unexpected way, the rescuers who are looking for your lost person have a helicopter, funds for fuel for it, great weather, pilots, etc. So let's fly.
Chances are you've been on an airplane at least once. It is incredibly interesting to look at the cities, rivers, roads, forests and fields passing by from above. Have you tried to see a man in the forest? It is extremely difficult to do this from the air. A helicopter with a high probability will detect your lost person only if he is in an open area (field, swamp) giving signals in bright clothes, and even better with a fire.
Myth 4. A thermal imager will help you.
Technological progress comes to the rescue of search and rescue services. But not everything is perfect here either. The thermal imager allows you to see objects with a higher temperature against the background of cold objects. It would seem that you can walk with a thermal imager over the forest (by helicopter, of course) and that's it. Unfortunately, such systems work effectively only in open areas or in very sparse forests. In summer, the thermal radiation of the forest often does not allow you to distinguish a person from its background, and devices that have decent technical capabilities for this cost millions of rubles. So for now it's still a myth. Rescuers usually do not have such equipment, and its use is limited.
Myth 5. You just need to comb the forest.
That's right, this is the most reliable way. In the Leningrad region, the average area of the search area is 100 square kilometers. In places there are areas up to 800 sq. km. Considering the speed of movement and the terrain, you will need 1-3 thousand trained and equipped people to comb 100 square kilometers in one day. IN Leningrad region on some days up to 10-15 people are lost at the same time ...
Myth 6. You need to get on a prepared car, ATV, all-terrain vehicle and find the lost ...
Of course, you can find the lost one in this way, but you need to be sure that your lost one has already left the forest on the road or clearing along which your SUV will pass. And if he went out on the road, is he really that lost? You can’t see much from the car window, and it’s even more difficult to hear its response ... We usually use vehicles to drop search groups, and not for search.
Myth 7. When nothing helps - ask a psychic ..
At all times there have been and are people who profit from the grief of others. Consciously or sincerely mistaken, they give hope to relatives. It is difficult to assess the moral side of their activities, but from the point of view of rescuers, everything is very simple. If your psychic is ready to go to the point where, in his opinion, the lost one is, then most often the rescuers will not refuse to accompany him. Only usually, psychics are not ready to verify their own assumptions ... which is a pity. Statistics are stubborn things. We don't have evidence to back them up...
That's all. And it wasn't a myth at all. And they are not completely destroyed or refuted. All this just goes to show that there is no perfect way to save a person in the forest. All means must be used, well, except for psychics, perhaps, and only in combination will a good result be obtained.
Have you ever saved a person's life? No? Do you think that heroism and saving others is possible only in war or at the time of natural disasters? Not at all! Among us live people who on their weekends, instead of sitting at home, go to the forest and look for "lost" - children or old people lost in the forest. Can you imagine what it is like for a small child to spend the night in the forest?
It all started in September last year, when little Liza Fomkina and her aunt got lost in Orekhovo-Zuyevo. For some time, only relatives were looking for Lisa, and then a request for help was posted on the forum of ferret lovers. And immediately spread across the Internet. Volunteers came to look for Lisa - people who did not know each other, they were looking for several days in a row. But they did not have time to save the child. After this tragedy, the volunteers decided to unite in a detachment and name it in honor of the deceased girl "Lisa Alert", by analogy with the American child search system "Amber Alert".
35. 
If you have nothing to do on any weekend, or you just want to spend a few hours in the forest in the fresh air in good company and, at the same time, perhaps save someone's life, then Lisa Alert's search party will be very happy to see you. Even if you don't have a car, someone will always take you with them.
What is needed for this? Register on the lizaalert.org site forum and follow new topics in the Active Searches section. There is information about who and where they are looking for in this moment how you can join the search or how you can help. You can also subscribe to SMS mailing list.
If you are not from Moscow or the region, this does not change anything. For example, the fragile girl who holds the squad site Lisa Alert on her shoulders lives in Denmark. There is always something to help.
In the peaceful life of the detachment, there is also where to apply your skills and talents. We need people to work on receiving calls, to organize events, to support and conduct various activities of the detachment.
The squad really needs people.
Here is what the head of the detachment, Grigory Sergeev, says: " It is scary to realize that there is a missing person in the forest, and we cannot help, because we have no people. It happens. We are still few, but there are many missing. Of course, we will never be able to completely close this problem. After all, dozens, if not hundreds, of people are lost in the Moscow region during the mushroom season. Many go out on their own, but many do not ... So far, only we see the problem in this."
In addition to personal participation, you can help the squad with the necessary equipment - walkie-talkies, flashlights, GPS receivers, batteries and much more:
* Clearings and paths in the forest are most convenient to "punch" on ATVs. These ATVs need to be stored somewhere and delivered to the search site on something.
* With a large search sector, it is required to put an equipped radio machine (repeater) into the forest. It must be an off-road vehicle, as the forests are usually tight with asphalt.
* Groups of searchers sometimes start work 5 or even 10 kilometers from the base camp. Such groups need to be thrown on off-road vehicles, which are always in short supply. And sometimes not at all. There are many 4x4 clubs in Russia that arrange club rides. You can do it for good and help save the lives of others.
* For work in the night mode of the headquarters, powerful lighting is required. For the operation of electrical appliances and lighting, a strong generator is required.
* All search engines need to be fed and watered. The difficult task of feeding dozens of people in the field requires a technical solution and products.
* All equipment must be transported and stored. And keep warm, and carry in something covered.
The list of needs is long. Read more.
If you have old tents, awnings, bowlers, boots or other camping equipment, then it will not rot aimlessly here either.
I'm leaving for Astrakhan tonight. Stay Tuned!
P.S. Spreading information about the detachment will be very useful for the guys.
HOW. Everyone gets lost in the forest: old people, youth and even children. If the word "lucky" can be used in this situation, then it will refer to those who are lost in the forest with a well-charged mobile phone. In this case, they themselves can declare that they cannot find a way out of the forest. In a less fortunate set of circumstances, the applicants are mostly relatives. Sometimes their messages are quite unexpected.
“Somehow I received a call from a lost son,” says Elozin. - We ask how old the father is. "92 years". Naturally, he does not have a mobile phone with him. We specify further: “What are his health problems?” "I've had three heart attacks." “Guys, how did you let him go into the forest?” "And he always walks..."
All searches begin with the fact that the map determines the search area, cutting it off from the rest of the space railways, highways, wide rivers. It is assumed that the lost people, having gone out onto the road, will go along it in search of someone alive, and they will not swim across the wide river, especially in cold weather. But sometimes the lost do illogical things. A few years ago, a grandmother and her grandson disappeared in the forest. The search lasted for a long time - the rescuers combed the entire intended territory, but they were not found. But still they decided to continue, going beyond the "cut off" area. Oddly enough, the missing people were found in a section of the forest behind the road - it turned out that the old woman with her grandson crossed the road and again went into the forest. When the rescuers found them, the child was already dead - he died of hypothermia.
TECHNIQUE. If you are lost in the forest (God forbid, of course) and hear the sound of an exploding rocket, then go towards it. Such rockets (noise and signal), as well as a megaphone, are used by rescuers to search in the forest. In addition, there is usually a service car at the edge of the forest, in which the driver turns on the siren every ten minutes (if there is no wind, it can be heard 3-3.5 km away). True, once the siren came in handy for rescuers in an unusual situation.
“A company of young people went to rest at the dacha,” Evgeny Elozin recalls a case “from work”. “Two boys and four girls. In the evening they drank: the girls, since they have a weak body, went to bed at eleven o'clock, while the guys drank until six in the morning. At about the same time, the girls went out for mushrooms (the young people were already asleep), and got lost. When they applied (they had a mobile phone with them), they said where they entered the forest. Arriving at the place, we found that one of the guys was sleeping in the car. It turned out to be unrealistic to wake him up, only the siren helped. Waking up, young people began to prove to us that no one was lost with them. When we took the girls out, they were already more or less sober - they laughed that they had never been woken up by a siren before.
BUTTON. Yevgeny Paramonov, a shift supervisor (by the way, he participated in the search for that grandmother with a child), comes into Elozin's office to sign some papers. Suddenly, his mobile phone rings - a Disney cartoon melody flows from his pocket: "Chip, Chip, Chip, Chip and Dale are in a hurry to us." He smiles and jokes: "Only the Buttons are not enough for us."
“This is hard, manly work,” Yelozin answers my question about the presence of women in the detachment. Not every man can stand it. I remember that on the basis of one application, we walked four kilometers through the swamp in eleven hours - we constantly pulled each other out of the swamp. They were looking for a man - his wife made a claim that he was lost, sitting in a swamp. Then it turned out that he had decoded, started drinking and was afraid to tell his wife about it. Naturally, it was not in the swamps.”
Recently, Leonid Lagoda, the head of the State Budgetary Institution "Department of the Leningrad Region Civil Protection Plant", received a touching letter from a resident of the village of Maksimovka, Volosovsky District. In that locality a man was lost, and rescuers came to search. Quote from the letter: “In addition to help, we also received colossal moral support. Your employees are real professionals and real men. It is thanks to such people that our country is held together.” When someone wrote this text, the lost one had not yet been found. Elozin says: “it’s clear that this is our job,” but when the saved grandmothers ask for the names of the children in order to light a candle for them in the church, of course, they are most likely very pleased.
AS CHILDREN. There are no standards by which it is determined how many days are allocated to search for a person: it all depends on the specific situation. The number of hours that rescuers can comb the forest is also not defined. In August, during the "hot" season, several applications were received per day from different regions: on the first call, the detachment left in the morning, returning only the next day. (Only the search for children differs from everyone else - not only rescuers, but also other structures throw all their strength into the search. It is also difficult to look for corpses in the forest (sometimes older people die in the forest - the heart caught and that's it) - you can walk a meter away from the body, not seeing him because of the grass).
“All people react differently to the fact that they are lost: someone panics, someone, on the contrary, is going,” says Elozin. – Grandparents of the old school usually calmly react to this situation. Old women, it happens, can live in the forest for 7-8 days. Panic is usually given to urban young people. Once in general, such a case occurred: five young people were lost in the forest, they called rescuers. While we were driving, they quarreled and dispersed through the forest. So we had to look not for five in one place, but for five people throughout the forest.
In general, a person can live in the forest for 2-3 weeks, continues Elozin. - Of course, if the nights are warm - after all, the main thing is that there is no hypothermia. And so - there is drinking water, berries too. Somehow, on the eleventh day of the search, my grandmother came out of the forest herself. Moreover, she said that she heard our siren, but for some reason did not go to her. They sometimes behave like children.
The conversation came to an end, no one called the rescuers into the forest. The season has really ended. Fortunately.
If you or your loved ones are lost in the forest, call 01 (from a landline) and 112 (from a mobile phone).
Last week alone, the Unified Duty Dispatch Service 112 of the Sergiev Posad District received three appeals. In total, five people were saved from possible death in the forest.
“On the 19th, two women got lost, they were found. On the 21st, he was lost, and on the 22nd, two people went into the forest near the village of Botovo. Everything ended well for everyone.”
Sergey Ryaby, Deputy Director of EDDS-112
People can be found by mobile phone. Determined by call geographical coordinates lost. The location of the person is visible on the map. But first, the operational duty officer conducts a survey to clarify his location.
Also, the phone must be charged. And if it is discharged, then the only hope is for the cellular operator, which has the coordinates of the point of the last registration on the network.
“To within seconds, we determine where he is based on how many cell towers grabbed him,”
Gennady Verkhovykh, duty officer of EDDS-112
People in the forest get lost all year round and for various reasons. Since the beginning of this year, 11 cases have been registered in the district. In total, 19 people were lost in the forest.
In winter, skiers were lost near Khotkovo. In the spring, people also went to the forest and got lost.
Now it's time for mushroom pickers to hunt quietly. People can get lost different ages, but the elderly are more likely to lose their bearings in the forest.
“Mushroom picking is an exciting activity, and if you don't know the forest, it's easy to get lost. On the territory of our region, the forests are not very deep - up to 8 kilometers, but the length of the forests is large. You can wander in them for a long time, ”-
Dmitry Safonov, Head of the Department for Participation in the Prevention and Elimination of Emergencies and the Solution of Civil Defense Problems of the Sergiev Posad District Administration
The coordinates of the lost people are passed on to the search and rescue team. Operational services, foresters, hunters and volunteers are also involved in the search. Interaction is debugged to automatism. If necessary, they can even call a helicopter.
According to rescuers, most often people neglect the usual safety rules. Lifeguard advice is simple. Hiking in the forest begins with equipment. Clothing should be bright so that it is noticeable in the forest. And most importantly - a charged phone.
“It is desirable that the phone has a navigator, a compass, although they must be able to use. You need to have water and matches with you, because the trip to the forest can be delayed. It is better to have a sweater made of wool, because wool warms even when wet.
Grigory Korsakov, shift supervisor of the Search and Rescue Detachment No. 13
This summer it took an average of 5 to 10 hours to search for people in the forest. All mushroom pickers managed to be saved. True, one woman broke her leg in the forest. She received medical attention.
