Unity Students Part of Search, Rescue Service

Thursday, November 22, 2007 - Bangor Daily News

Two students from the Unity College Search and Rescue Team take part in a rescue opperation of helping a victim use ropes to scale a steep terrain. (Photo by Charles Alves) 

UNITY, Maine — Whenever a call comes in about someone lost in the woods, Unity College students show up to help with search and rescue operations.

"We’re just part of the search and rescue system in the state of Maine," said Mick Womersley, associate professor of human ecology, director of sustainability and faculty mentor of the search and rescue team at the college, in a recent interview.

"We’ve got 10 or 15 trained people ready to go Monday through Saturday," Womersley said.

"Our primary role is to provide the Maine Warden Service with a team of trained students from the college to the search scene, and to get there as quickly as we can, with all the right equipment," he said.

Mark Latti, spokesman for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, said the agency’s search and rescue operations in the state would not be as successful as they are without the help from the college teams.

"We work with a lot of volunteer groups who train with us and train on their own," he said.

"When someone is injured or lost in the woods, we can call on these groups, like Unity, to help us out," he said.

"Over the years, they have proven invaluable," he said of Unity’s team.

"Some of the terrain they walk through includes swamps, marshes, thickets, brooks," Latti said. "They go through them, and they do a fantastic job."

Unity College has some of the same equipment the Maine Warden Service uses, such as global positioning system units and radios, said Womersley.

"We’ve had a lot of support from student government, and that can build up over 10 or 15 years," he said of the team’s self-sufficiency.

"They’ve built up a professional rescue cache, with all the radios, ropes, generators — everything a professional staff would want — and a trailer to take to a search and rescue site for a command post, if we ever need one.

"We’d love to get our hands on a secondhand vehicle that we could use to transport the lead team out to a rescue site," he said. "Right now we use college vehicles, and we sort of take our chances that something will show up, and another professor isn’t using it for a class."

Recently, Unity’s team went to Lewiston to help look for Donna Paradis, a 38-year-old murder victim whose body was found Nov. 12 behind a mall, he said.

"A lot of times we’ll be asked to go back over an outdoor murder scene to look for more clues or to look for a body," Womersley added.

Students train every week. Training includes first aid, map reading, radio procedure, using GPS equipment, learning different forms of searches and search management, and taking classes on conservation law enforcement, one of the academic majors at the college.

"When we get called out, it’s by an officer from the Maine Association for Search and Rescue, a statewide organization whose job it is to supervise the training and the organization of all the other groups.

"We use their standard when we train our kids," he said.

A native of Yorkshire, England, Womersley said he received his training with the Mountain Rescue Service of the Royal Air Force.

"My national training set very high standards, which I carried over here," he said.

Charles Alves, a Unity student and conservation law enforcement major from Marshfield, Mass., is a deputy team leader who has been involved with search and rescue for 2½ years.

"When you’re called, you have to be prepared to stay overnight and take sleeping bags," he said. "Most of the time, we’re there for one day."

Andy Brady, a Unity senior, Eagle Scout, team leader and conservation law enforcement major from Annapolis, Md., has been involved with search and rescue since his freshman year.

"I’ve learned a lot about leadership from the team, my summer internships, and my classes," he said.