Meridian Public Safety Training Facility welcomed 17 first responders from throughout the state this week as they take part in a Fundamentals of Search and Rescue course. The course arms police, fire, emergency medical personnel and others with the skills needed to both organize a search and rescue people safely.

 

Public Safety Director Doug Stephens said the class, which is offered twice a year, helps prepare emergency workers for everything from a missing elderly person to search and rescue operations following a natural disaster. The five-day class covers topics such as incident command, safety and survival, land navigation, how to conduct searches and more.

“When we’re looking for a lost person, we’re not actually looking for the person, although that is the ultimate goal,” he said. “It’s also to find clues and evidence left behind where that person may or may not have been.”

 

Students sat through four days of classroom instruction before taking on a skills test Friday, Stephens said, which tests them in each of the core areas of the course. Students must also pass a written exam to graduate from the class.

 

Unlike other classes for first responders, Stephens said the Fundamentals of Search and Rescue is an individual course, where each student is scored on their own. That means students can’t make up for weaknesses in some areas by relying on more proficient teammates to carry them through.

 

At the end of the day, the goal of the course is to prepare emergency personnel with knowledge and training they can then take back and implement in their home communities, Stephens said. While graduates of the course won’t be ready to teach the class on their own, they will have valuable skills that can make a difference in a search and rescue situation.

 

“Every time we teach this class, I tell people, everybody talks about knowledge is power, and that’s great, but sharing of knowledge is powerful,” he said. “So take this knowledge, go back and share with others so when you have that incident, you have that tornado, you have that lost person in your local area, you can share this information with people and start the process and get the process started to try to help find these people.”

 

Joseph Harrison, with Petal Fire Department, said the course has a lot to learn. There is a lot of information and science that goes into search and rescue, he said, and absorbing it all then putting it into practice has been challenging.

 

“The most challenging skill set for me so far is just the amount of information to keep up with your map work and keep up with where you’re going whenever you’re just kind of on your own and having to steer yourself in the woods,” he said.

 

Stephens said the class is funded through a grant from the Mississippi Department of Homeland Security, which covers the expense at no cost to the city. The grant also helps students’ departments as they only have to pay for travel and payroll for the students while they attend the class.

 

For the facility staff and instructors, the reward is getting to see former students put the skills they learned in Meridian to use making a difference in their communities, he said.

 

“This is a skill set that thousands of individuals have come through this facility and have gone out and performed these types of tasks and been successful, and it’s good to know that we, the Meridian Public Safety Training Facility, have been a small part of educating people on going out and being able to perform that,” he said. “And it’s all grant funded. It didn’t cost us anything.