SEEKING THE LOST Story of the Contra Costa County Search and Rescue Team
	OCTOBER 2004

by Evan A. Hubbard

It was such a little thing that I might have overlooked it completely — a small piece of blue cloth sticking out of a mound of fresh dirt.

Just a tiny little piece of colored material! And yet the sight brought with it the conviction of a monstrous reality. On one level I knew I couldn’t be certain, but in my heart I was sure that we had found little Angela.

This took place nineteen years ago, after little 5-year-old Angela Bugay was reported missing. She and her younger brother had run an errand from a neighbor’s house to her apartment. The brother subsequently returned without the sister. The family called the Antioch PD who, in turn, called out the Contra Costa County Search & Rescue Team, of which I am a part. We searched for more than a week for the little girl.

In these kinds of searches you really have to look in every nook and cranny you can find. As part of that effort, I distinctly recall crawling through a pipe beneath Hwy 4.

A week later we mounted a massive coordinated search, crossing through the fields with horses in a line, the ground searchers moving forward in a row in front of them. The theory behind this technique is that the differing angles of vision between the walkers and the mounted searchers might increase the likelihood of discovering something.

We were conducting a grid search in Antioch off James Donlon Boulevard when we saw the fragment of cuff from her trousers sticking out from Angela’s hastily dug grave and found her body.

After almost two decades justice was finally served in the case. Last year her mother’s ex boyfriend was convicted of Angela’s homicide through DNA evidence.

In the Beginning
I was born in Pittsburg and lived all of my life in the East County. My dad was born in Pittsburg, as well. I'm actually sixth generation California. For the past six yeas I've been trying to work out our genealogy and still can't get the family out of California.

My initial contact with search and rescue came 40 years ago when a Nordic Search and Rescue team searching through the wilderness around Tahoe found the site of a crashed airliner together with 89 bodies, including the body of my mom.

As a young person I was drawn by the idea of men and women who would search through rough country to locate that plane and find my mom. About four years later I actually met some of the search and rescue people who had found the site.

That experience filled me with admiration for the impressive service that those guys were providing. I was in awe at their professionalism. Even though they were a volunteer service, they seemed to me to have the right stuff. They knew what they were doing. They were highly trained and some of them had a lot of experience.

I was part of the '69 draft. I didn't actually get drafted but, since my number was six on the lottery, I took the preemptive step of joining the Navy. I interrupted my budding career as an apprentice housepainter to become an aviation electronics technician and crewmember on a medivacs helicopter in Danang Viet Nam.

The experiences on that chopper piqued my interests again in activities involved in rescuing people. When I got out of the service I resumed my occupation as a housepainter, eventually becoming a maintenance painter for the Contra Costa County General Services department and currently assigned to the County Hospital.

I was member of a CB club in 1975 and in one of our meetings we discussed using our technology for search and rescue, especially getting involved in searches for missing children. One of the members said that the Sheriff's Department already had such a team. I found out when the SAR (Search and Rescue) Team met and attended a meeting. That was the end of my involvement with the CB club. I had found an organization I could dedicate my life to.

Becoming Part of an Elite Team
Even though search and rescue teams are organizations comprised entirely of volunteers, all members have to undergo a rigorous training program. I had to learn techniques of ground searching and 4-wheel drive transportation. I owned a 4-wheel drive Toyota Land Cruiser at the time. The prospect of being able to go off-roading with permission was, of course, one of the many things that drew me into this.

We all had to get basic first aid training followed by a 48-hour course in advanced medical and first aid techniques. Besides that, we attended monthly meetings that involved search training, including such exotic skills as learning to rappel safely down the side of a wall in the Consolidated Fire Academy.

Two years of steady training were required before I finally was able to meet the minimum training standards, become eligible for call-outs, and could go on my first assignment.

My first search was for a missing teenage girl, reported as possibly suicidal, in the Tassajara Valley, near San Ramon. Back in those days searchers were assigned a call sign, called a unit number, by families. My wife was involved in that event and the two of us were designated "Unit 62." However, my wife and I weren't ever searching in the same area, so every time they called "Unit 62" we both answered. Confusing.

We searched all day in the area for the missing teen. We carried implements called "tracking sticks," which in most cases are nothing but ski poles with the webbing removed. I was on a farm and poking my stick into every pile of hay I could find, all the while hoping, but at the same time not hoping, that my tracking stick would actually hit something.

The missing girl finally was discovered at her boyfriend's house, where she had been all the time. She wasn't missing; she was on a date! That kind of thing happens all the time. We just mark it down as training experience. And, in fact, every search provides valuable experience we can use for subsequent searches. Each event becomes a training ground that we learn from.

The thing we learned from that first one, for example, was that the unit numbering idea didn't work well and now each of us are issued our own call signs.

Tools and Training
In the early days we were still using CBs, which were huge units with tall radios. We have since replaced them with VHF radios and cell phones. Since we are a volunteer organization, we provide most of our own equipment. GPS units are starting to turn up as standard field equipment, of course. As a team we recently used some of our donated money to buy ten of these devices. Our main strategy remains maps, compasses, and (when available) street signs. The foundational training program still includes basic map and compass classes.

A full set of county topographical maps are available online. When we initiate a search in some area, we simply print these things out. Each of us has our own copy of the Thomas Brothers map book.

Qualifications for full membership in our SAR team have been increased since I joined. We have upgraded the basic first aid training, which is now called the First Responder Course, and requires 60 hours for completion. After that, candidates must attend the Search and Rescue Academy, for 96 hours of basic search training.

That's a lot of work for a volunteer, but when they graduate from the Academy team, members have simply met the minimum standards. Besides our monthly training, we conduct SAR conferences with large training components all over the US. Our team participates in an annual training in Barstow, which includes three intensive days of hard work. The huge SAREX (Search and Rescue Exercise) is an annual all-state event, which was held this year in Sacramento. NASAR (The National Association of Search and Rescue) conducts updates and trainings at this event. NASAR holds its own conference every year in the spring. In 2005 Alameda County will be hosting the venue for this. It will be a real honor for a Bay Area site to host this national event.

Advanced training is available on an ongoing basis covering many skills. For example, some of our people go on to become EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians), and even Wilderness EMTs.

Minds, Hearts, and Bodies Ready for the Hunt
The Contra Costa Search and Rescue Team has just under 100 members. Sixteen of these are currently enrolled in the academy. Our team is part of a nation-wide totally volunteer organization of men and women. Tens of thousands of us all around the nation are donating our time, energy, and personal resources because of our desire to help others and to be a part of something that really makes a difference.

I tell people coming into the program, "You can make as much out of this as you want." For some of us it becomes a major life-style change.

My son and daughter are now grown but they both remember as children going to bed with their backpacks packed and lying by the door. When we would get them out of bed in the middle of the night and hustle them off to a neighbor who could watch them while we responded to some emergency, they accepted the move without question or complaint.

We take pride in preparing ourselves to conduct any kind of search, under all types of conditions. This is reflected in the number of resources we have available:

• Seven equestrian resources
• Several kinds of K-nine resources, including area search dogs, trailing dogs, decomp dogs, and water search dogs
• We have a Mountain Bike quick response team
• An ATV resource
• A wilderness resource
• A tracking resource, including sign-cutter man trailers

I'm especially amazed at these trackers, who have studied the science of following a person's trail to the point that they are able to track people by following signs of their passage that are completely invisible to me.

The members of our tracking resource have been learning their craft from a trainer up in Washoe County who has a positively spooky ability to keep to a person's trail. The comment about him is that he can follow a person's track across a concrete parking lot. It is a testimony to how great this guy is, that none of us are certain about how much of an exaggeration that really is.

Our wilderness resource includes people prepared to go backpacking into the most remote wilderness areas. Last spring, for example, a group of them went up to Mt. Shasta and practiced Nordic and Alpine Search and Rescue techniques with crampons and ice axes. Members of this group love to rope themselves together and jump off perfectly good rocks.

I'm staying away from that group. I can't get over an opinion that if the good Lord wanted me to jump off a rock, He would have installed a suction cup where my belly button is.

Working Together to Find the Lost
Each SAR team is an independent agency operating in coordination with the Governor's Office of Emergency Services organization under the California Government Code. Each Sheriff's Department is responsible for the search and rescue response in their particular county.

We're pretty proud of our local team; we are leaders in the field. For example, 28 years ago we became the first team to use women as full-fledged team members. Before that they were limited to being members of a women's auxiliary. We were the first to realize that women are able to do a lot more than provide coffee and donuts to the men who are doing the actual work. Now, of course, everyone realizes that.

As another example of our leadership, three decades ago our team became the first in the state to use bloodhounds for tracking people.

The quality continues under the auspices of Sergeant Eric Christiansen, who is the current Volunteer Services Organization Coordinator, and our liaison with the Sheriff's Department.

Sergeant Christiansen really believes in what we do and shows up at every call to encourage us all and to thank us again for what we do. I think he shakes the hand of every person who turns up at each search. Last week, for example I showed up at Bethel Island to search for a missing child at two o'clock in the morning. There was Eric bright-eyed and bushy-tailed greeting us and expressing gratitude.

The State is beginning to develop an initiative among all 58 California counties to set standards for SAR teams across the entire state. This is a great thing! We'll finally have a network in place for defining standards.

A decade ago a hiker was missing on Mt. Diablo. Our team was stretched to the limits, so we had teams from all over the area join us. Each participating team had its own standards for everything from training to paperwork. In some cases, basic training consisted of a single course centered on an 8-hour video.

We found the body a week after the guy had been reported as missing. We subsequently conducted a massive critique of the operation. It was clear to everybody that something had to be done.

One of the things that came out of that critique was the creation of a new organization called the Bay Area Search and Rescue Council (BASRC). The council has the task of facilitating individual SAR teams in sharing training, ideas, and suggestions among themselves.

Now all the SAR teams in the Bay Area are pretty much trained to the levels BASRC has identified. As a result, if we get ground searchers from Solano County, for example, we know what levels they were trained to.

BASRC is not a governing or certification body, it simply facilitates our communicating among ourselves. In addition, BASRC conducts a mock training search, called a BATSAR (Bay Area Training Search and Rescue) every year to help us develop our skills.

What we Actually Do
Contra Costa County conducts many rural searches. We don't have a lot of wilderness areas, so our County includes a lot of type-1 search areas, which are classified as suburban open regions. We're more likely to be searching through dumpsters than breaking trails through some area with no sign of human existence.

Most of the actual search and rescue field activities take place in the middle of emergencies. You're never present at the beginning, and most often not the end.

This work is never boring, however. Searches always challenge you mentally and physically. You're continually thinking ahead, surveying the possibilities, and making choices about what to do now and where to look next.

The scenario for each field experience is unique. You might be searching for an escaped criminal, a child, an adult missing under suspicious circumstances, a senior citizen, a demented person, or, sometimes, a completely unknown individual.

For example, a car turns up parked along the road with the key still in the ignition and a purse with money in it but no identification. "What happened to the driver?" It is a question that simply must be answered.

In some cases we are searching for a person who, it turns out, doesn't want to be found. I remember one case in which officers found a car parked on the end of a cul de sac. It was the middle of the night. The license check came back as someone from out of the area. A rose was found in the front seat between the pages of a Bible with an underlined passage.

The circumstances looked very much like a potential suicide. The police brought us in with the dogs. We started from the car to trail the person. After the dogs followed the trail for about 3/4 of a mile we came upon a couple in the middle of a clearing and in the middle of a very romantic embrace. Obviously they didn't feel a need of being found by anybody.

I really felt like asking them, "Why don't you get a room? What is it with the pinecones and the ants? Are you insane?" Of course, I didn't say any such thing.

The Best Part of the Job
Sometimes we succeed in actually saving lives. A year ago, for example, a car showed up in Pinol, with out-of-state plates. The vehicle was registered to a missing woman from Pennsylvania. We were called upon to assist.

We searched all night in very rugged and steep terrain. We located the woman in the morning. She had taken medications that completely disoriented her. She had no idea where she was or what she was doing.

I'm sure we saved the woman's life. (However, her troubles were still probably not over, since we found her lying in the middle of a big patch of Poison Oak.)

The best part of this business, of course, comes when a search results in an absolutely joyful outcome. A few months ago, for example, we were called to assist the Santa Cruz SAR team searching for a missing 4-year old. The little boy had wandered away from his home in the redwoods. His brother and sister had returned without him.

The child spent the night alone in the rain. One of my teams in my own division located him alive and well. The only thing the child wanted was a hamburger. That was great! We were laughing and rejoicing together! Citizens driving by were laughing and crying, and giving us thumbs-up.

As difficult as it might be to believe, our Contra Costa team was involved this year in rescue and support for people stranded by a potentially deadly blizzard. One of our mobile units was requested to take kerosene heaters and supplies to people snowed in by a blizzard in Placerville, up in Eldorado County.

Our members put in a lot of volunteer hours in service to our community. Last June at the County Fair, for example, we had a minimum of three people at a time, working 12 hours a day, for the entire four days, manning the fair's first aid station.

We also sponsor an Explorer Program for Boy Scouts, ages 14 and up. These kids take the same training as adults and work as equals right alongside the adult members.

The Scouts wear the same uniforms as everyone else on the team except for a different patch. The only limitation is that we will not place the Explorers in any potentially life-threatening situation. We provide them guidance and protection. Except for that, they're expected to pull their weight.

Everyone wishes they could do something when a child is missing. We're in the happy place where we actually can do something. An employer groused at me once. "Somebody will go find that child. Why does it have to be you?" I answered, "Because I am somebody."

All of us who spend a lot of time, effort, and expense in search and rescue activities do so because of a number of motivations and payoffs. One of the main reasons some of us get so involved is because eventually we have to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask that guy or girl looking back, "What have you ever done that made any difference in this world?"

I can look that guy straight in the eye without flinching because I have an answer. I'm doing something worth doing.

The motto of our team is, "So others may live." It's a good motto. It's worth every sacrifice we could ever be called upon to make.

Contact us for questions about donating or for information about joining our team at www.contracostasar.org

You can write us at

Contra Costa County Sheriff's Search & Rescue Team
50 Glacier Drive
Martinez, CA 94553

Or contact the Volunteer Services Coordinator at 925-646-4461