Search and Rescue

The Saturday morning of the Camporee I was really thinking that I had bitten off more than I could chew. If you plan on taking this one on you had better make sure that you have a very good support staff and lots of adults who can help out in advance, of which I had neither.

This one takes a huge amount of preparation time in calling all of the agencies and getting committments from them to show up. You also have to talk to all of the Troop and Den leaders to get the word out to them to make sure that you have enough victims.

The premise of this one is that there is a plane crash in the back woods and there just happens to be a large group of Boy Scouts around to help out. We had 99 2nd year Webelos and around 25 of their parents as the victims, all were made up with realistic makeup. We had the MN National Gaurd bring a helicopter and a HUMVEE ambulance. We had 3 medical explorer posts, 2 of which brought ambulances. The NG brought 75 stretchers, a GP medium tent, and other assorted materials. We had the local county sheriff's department on hand who brought radios, the MN Search and Rescue Dog Assoc. brought 4 search dogs, and we got reflective vests donated to make the boys really feel like they were on rescue crews.

We also had lots of airplane debris donated by a local aircraft salvage yard. The MSP airport fire dept also let us borrow 5 seat rows from a 757. We found a luggage repair company that gave us about 40 junk suitcases, and we got Ragstock, a company that all it handles is rags to donate us around 200 pounds of rags to put in suitcases and to scatter around.

We also had the local volunteer fire dept on hand cutting open cars with a jaws of life. We had the sheriffs dept water patrol, dive team, and coast gaurd on hand to do a thing about water saftey. We had the Red Cross on hand with their Crises Wagon to talk to the boys about how to handle victims in emergencys like this one.

We had also planned to give airplane rides to Life and Eagle Scouts as part of the EAA's Young Eagle program. Unfortunately Mother Nature didn't cooperate and we had to cancel the plane rides.

I almost forgot (was going through the pics when I remembered) we had the MN State Patrols Helicopter from which we had St Paul firemen rappelling off of it. Unfortunately we didn't get any pictures of that, but we got some after the helicopter landed and the firemen and pilots talked to the boys.

Bear in mind that if you decide to do this Camporee it is a logistical nightmare. Bear in mind that you do not have to do everything that I did, hopefully you have more sense than I did.

Event Form

Budget

Pic 1, Pic 2, Pic 3, Pic 4, Pic 5, Pic 6, Pic 7, Pic 8

What went good:

Just about everything!!

What didn't go good:

The weather. Oh, well, no plane rides. I will leave that for next year.

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