A review of the Coast Guard's search and rescue mission : hearing before the Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, House of Representatives, One Hundred Eleventh Congress, first session, September 30, 2009.

A review of the Coast Guard's search and rescue mission: hearing before the Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, House of Representatives, One Hundred Eleventh Congress, first session, September 30, 2009.

A thirty-foot yacht, adrift well out to sea, sends, "MAYDAY! MAYDAY! Please respond to our plea!" Hearing this call for help, the United States Coast Guard leaps into action. A team of four highly trained rescue specialists head out in an H-60 Jayhawk helicopter. Battling fierce conditions, the Coast Guard team finally locates the disabled boat, rescues the crew, treats injured passengers, and carries them back to safety. Complemented by dramatic, striking illustrations, Chris L. Demarest's text brings into vivid focus one of the many important jobs performed by the U.S. Coast Guard. A detailed author's note provides additional information about the search-and-rescue process, making this a terrific book for any school or home library.

Fundamental limitations inherent in manual search planning methods have severely limited the application of advances in several areas that could improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the U.S. Coast Guard's search and rescue mission. These areas include advances in search theory, environmental data products, knowledge of detection profiles for various sensors, and knowledge of leeway behavior. The U.S. Coast Guard's computerized search planning aids have not kept up with advances in these areas or with technology in general. This report reviews the history and recent advances of search theory and its application to a variety of search problems. It then reviews the history of the U.S. Coast Guard's search planning methods, showing where search theory was initially applied, albeit in a necessarily very limited way, and where later modifications departed from the theoretical basis of the original methodology. Several computerized search planning decision support tools are analyzed and compared, as are the differences between an analytic approach and a simulation approach. The results are summarized in a matrix. The U.S. Coast Guard needs a new search planning decision support tool for search and rescue and other missions. This tool should use the simulation approach due to its power and flexibility as compared to analytic techniques.

The Extraordinary Story Of The U.S. Coast Guard Since its founding more than two hundred years ago, the United States Coast Guard has rescued over a million people. On any given day, "Coasties" respond to 125 distress calls and save over a dozen lives. Yet despite having more than 50,000 active-duty and reserve members on every ocean and on our nation's coasts, great lakes, and rivers, most of us know very little about this often neglected but crucial branch of the military. In Rescue Warriors, award-winning journalist David Helvarg brings us into the daily lives of Coasties, filled with a salty maritime mix of altruism and adrenaline, as well as dozens of death-defying rescues at sea and on hurricane-ravaged shores. Helvarg spent two years with the men and women of the Coast Guard, from the halls of their academy in New London, Connecticut, to the frigid, storm-tossed waters of Alaska's Bering Sea, to the northern Persian Gulf, where they currently guard Iraqi oil terminals. The result is a masterpiece of adventure reporting---the definitive book on America's "forgotten heroes."