After a six-day search for two missing children wrapped up this week in Pictou County, an expert on lost people is shedding light on the difficulty of finding children in the woods.
Lily Sullivan, 6, and Jack Sullivan, 4, have been missing since May 2, when police received a 911 call reporting that they had wandered away from their home on Gairloch Road in Lansdowne Station, roughly 25 kilometres southwest of New Glasgow, N.S.
Police announced Wednesday that after six days of hundreds of volunteers scouring the heavily wooded areas surrounding the home, there was no sign of the children and it’s not likely they are alive.
Robert Koester, a search mission co-ordinator with the Virginia Department of Emergency Management in the United States, wrote the book Lost Person Behavior: A Search and Rescue Guide on Where to Look – for Land, Air and Water. He also created an app called Lost Person Behavior, which was used by searchers in Lansdowne Station.
Koester has collected a database of a half-million search and rescue incidents from around the world and compiled them in a database, which he uses to create statistics.
He told CBC News he can’t speculate on the Lansdowne Station search but can provide general comments based on his data.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity:
When a four-year-old and a six-year-old child go missing in a rural, wooded area, what are the first things that searchers need to consider?
Well, the first thing is the beginning of a good solid investigation: the age, the scenario, where were they last seen, when they went missing, the timelines, what caused them to go missing? Usually there’s not one possible scenario, but multiple possible scenarios that could be considered. And by scenario, I mean they could have gotten lost … they could have gotten hurt, they could have gotten sick, although two children at the same time getting sick would be much less likely. They could have gone into a water feature if water features are a possibility, and a criminal scenario is also always a scenario. All these things have to be considered.
Usually, the next thing is once you know the age group is we can look at some basic statistics like how far do four- to six-year-olds typically go when they get lost … Half of four- to six-year-olds are going to be found within … a half a kilometre away.
So 75 per cent [of children] are 1.2 kilometres away.… If you want to go far enough to find 95 per cent then there’s a dramatic jump because you’re now starting to get into more outliers and that number is 6.6 kilometres away, which dramatically increases your search area.
And what about the forest conditions? This area has really dense underbrush and fallen trees, and it’s almost like you can’t even see through the forest when you’re trying to look. How could that set kids back in terms of how far they can go?
This sometimes limits the data, but in kind of a surprising result, a lot of my data also comes from the Pacific Northwest, so Oregon, Washington state, British Columbia. And you would think those thicker forests might slow people down, but in fact they tend to go a little bit further than in the more eastern vegetation.
Certainly in Virginia, which is where I’m based out of, people don’t go as far during the summer because of all of the thick vines and thick vegetation. So it’s always taken into consideration, but the data includes all of those cases.
CONTINUE READING: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/missing-person-expert-lansdowne-station-search-1.7531338
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