I see we are starting to pick up a few more people. For everyone's interest, though, I am including a link to the State Urban Search and Rescue Alliance (SUSAR) at www.susar.org so you can learn more about this initiative.

Several state programs that are federalized are also members, like TX-TF1; this organization is for anyone who is interested in networking about US&R, sharing information including procedures, etc., and we also share training openings.

For example, if SC-TF1 has several openings in an upcoming Technical Search Specialist course, we will open it up to any SUSAR member team to fill it for our cost. This fills classes, maximizes the opportunities to get into courses (especially if your team would struggle to fill an entire class itself), and gets these people around the country to see what other teams are doing.

Right now we have around 41 states and Puerto Rico represented. Not every state has the "official" US&R authority on board and some states don't have an organized state program. But you can get information on how to help build a response asset between local and federalized response, you can learn about different things going on with the industry that you don't always get to hear, and you get to meet people with really interesting ideas.

I may duplicate this post on the main forum to educate some other people, so if you see it twice, you're not imagining things.

Come check us out and see what all the excitement is all about.