Corps System Plan
Since its inception the unit has studied the evolution of SAR throughout North America. It became obvious that although there are many state-of-the art tasks and systems in existence, there are equally as many ideas of how we should organize them into an acceptable national response capability. Many people agree that we need some sort of national response, but we can't seem to agree on what direction we need to take. This has led to a severe fragmentation of SAR.
We decided to think out of the box and make the extreme effort of not only proposing a system but demonstrating one that would work by actually putting one together, at least on a pilot basis.
Currently the Corps units will go wherever requested. We are registered and active in the tri-county area of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. We are developing and building operational teams in several counties within this geographical area. In addition to the individual county units, we are in the process of building a region logistics and operational support system.
The following outline is our perception of how such a concept would be structured.
The first layer for the system is the county unit. The team members are recruited from the specific county. Once trained, the members are responsible for all SARR activities that they are called on to provide. Each county unit will cover all the rudimentary type of SARR missions with emphasis on certain exceptional events that will be based on the various types SARR missions that historically take place in that particular county.
To further the concept is the formation of a region support system, this includes an administrative staff, a training cadre, a logistics system and an operational support capability. The administration staff has the responsibility of overseeing those administrative details that are needed for both region and county units. The training staff is responsible for the training of new members and the continuous training of all members. The logistics team is responsible for obtaining and overseeing the maintenance of all the organizations facilities and equipment. The operations sections of the region is to coordinate the needs of each county unit and to provide higher level support teams to the county units when and where they are needed.
Any given state could therefore divide itself into regions, several counties to each region. The state staff that would have the responsibility of overseeing the regions would be drawn from the region staffs that would in turn be drawn for the county units.
The feeling is that this type of approach would allow more individuals to participate, faster assimilation of new materials, equipment, techniques, training and operational procedures. It would support the achievement of a professional level of SARR volunteers. More importantly, it will give the victims a better chance for survival.
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