Sheriff’s Search and Rescue Train with the California National Guard in South Lake Tahoe

On Sunday, February 12, 2012, the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue Team hosted a joint training with the 1-168th Medevac Wing of the California National Guard and the Douglas County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue Team. Training was conducted in and around Emerald Bay State Park. The 1-168th Medevac Wing, based at Mather Army Air Field Base near Sacramento, brought two Blackhawk helicopters equipped for search and rescue operations with hoists as well as their crew of Chiefs and Medics. This training is the latest in a series of joint exercises that EDSO SAR has undertaken with the 1-168th Medevac Wing in the last two months in an effort to increase our mutual capabilities and readiness to respond to back country emergencies, technical rescues and large scale disasters.

Sunday’s training involved many aspects of Search and Rescue operations:

Planning and securing landing zones

Loading SAR personnel into running aircraft (also known as hot loading)
Hoisting SAR personnel into hovering aircraft
Air-ground coordination of aircraft operations
Patient treatment, packaging, and hoisting to the aircraft
Insertion of California National Guard (CNG) medics from the aircraft directly onto a ground based rope rescue system on a cliff face
Joint simulated treatment of the casualty on the cliff face by SAR rescuer and CNG medic
Transfer of the litter (containing the simulated casualty) from the cliff face onto the aircraft’s hoist cable and into the aircraft
Extraction of the CNG medic from the cliff face onto the aircrafts hoist cable and back into the aircraft

The El Dorado Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue Team in conjunction with our allied agencies are committed to providing our community and our visitors with timely, expert extraction from hazardous situations. Trainings such as these demonstrate our commitment to readiness and excellence for our mission. Our partnership with the California National Guard for both training and deployments will greatly enhance our capabilities in many areas of technical rescue as well as search operations.

El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office would like to thank the 1-168th Medevac Wing for their initiative and hard work in both forming this partnership and in the trainings themselves. We would also like to thank the following agencies for their invaluable assistance in this operation: California State Parks and Recreation, CHP, Lake Valley Fire Dept., California Conservation Corps, and the South Lake Tahoe Airport.