Tenacious Search

It is amazing to see the whole community come together in helping to search for Jim. This is the second search in a few months where I witness the power of the Internet being harnessed for the search of a missing person. Having managed hundred of searches for missing people I can truly see how this will change how we search for missing people in the future.

 The ability to redeploy satelites and get satelite imagery for analyzis is something we have often wished we had the ability to do. But we have also said that this technology may have its limits as you are experiencing. The resolution of images, enourmous volumes of data and the inability to see through the clouds is something we have considered as problems.

I would therefore like to suggest that you don’t rely entirely on satelite technology. Good old fashioned groundwork is also required. I would therefore like to come up with some suggestions that this group might be able to do/organize. Some of them you may have thought of, but others might help you come up with new ideas

•  Work on getting more details about the 7:30pm cell phone connection. Work on getting the phone company to find out what tower this came from. This provided valuable information in the search for James Kim in Oregon couple of months ago. Each cell tower has a limited range so tha might help you define a smaller search area.
• Try to find people who might have met or seen Jim. Put posters up in all marinas around the greater SF area. Show his boat on the poster as well as picture of Jim. This might provide you with more leads of his whereabouts during the day he went missing.
• Get in touch with sailing organizations and fishermen in the area. See if they are willing to help you organize search on the sea. Getting boats to sail the coastline south and north from SF might provide clues that are not visible from the air. Remember that you may not be looking for the boat but rather debri from it. When organizing a search like this work with the Coast Guard. See if they are willing to help you create search plans. If not find a retired CG search manager who will. If possible get all those searching to track their search using a GPS, then overlay these on the map to get an idea of how much search coverage you have managed.
• Follow up on an idea posted earlier about tracking ships in the area. Even though they may not have been in collision with the boat they may have seen it sailing.

Hope this creates some ideas of what can be done to search. Remember that a search for a missing person is always a mistery. A mistery is solved by finding clues. The clues come from finding information about the last position the missing person was in and then clues of what might have happened.

Keep up the spirit and keep searching!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007 at 9:54 am and is filed under posters & newspaper ads, planes and boats, Cell Phones, Physical Search, Satellite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.