FireRescue's Technical Rescue Web column
From the Ground Up: The history of the National Urban Search & Rescue Program, part 2
By Harold Schapelhouman

Editor's Note: This article is part of a series on the history of the national USAR program. Read the previous post:
Part 1: How It All Started


In 1990, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) selected 25 urban search and rescue (USAR) task forces and created what is now known as the National Response System (NRS).

Like our 24 other counterparts, the Menlo Park Fire Protection District, located along the San Francisco Bay in California, applied for and was awarded a coveted designation as one of the founding national task forces.
As I mentioned in Part 1, “How It Started,” it’s important to look back to see how far we’ve come and to understand where we are today and how we got there. It’s also important to look ahead to where we need to go so that the national program continues to be relevant, responsive and collaborative with the nation’s responders, and best serves the public’s needs, as we approach the program’s 20th anniversary.
USAR Then & Now
All the founding task forces have a story to tell, and it’s important that they memorialize that history before it fades into the past and is forgotten. I’m sure each task force could identify a small group of people responsible for their successful federal application into the NRS and those who pulled it all together once they were actually selected.

I was involved in both the application and creation of California Task Force 3 (CA-TF3), first as a firefighter and today as the fire chief who commands the task force’s sponsoring fire agency. Over the years, many of my counterparts in both our task force and those around the country have moved on and/or retired. But they were the ones who witnessed firsthand the struggles of the early days of the program, the first deployments and the synergy needed at the state and national level to hold it all together. For those of us who were true believers in the vision and promise of what the NRS could be, it was an exciting adventure filled with many ups and downs.

Starting a task force is very much like starting your own business. You need a plan, capital, good people to help you, a vision of where you want to go, some luck and the willingness to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy to make it all work.

Tasked with the original grant submittal by my fire chief at the time, it’s amazing to look back now and realize how much we didn’t know, how naive all the teams were and how different the program is today from where it began.

Our agency decided that we wouldn’t include frontline equipment in our grant submittal and only surplus equipment would be used. Shortly after we were selected as a task force, I was advised that our mechanical shop had disposed of several boxes of old radios, chargers and parts. That afternoon found me “dumpster diving” to retrieve the worn out and broken radio equipment that we would proudly proclaim as our task force’s first official “equipment procurement.”

Nearly two decades later, those days are hard to imagine as I walk into our 26,000-square-foot storage warehouse that holds our team’s equipment: new vehicles, semi-trucks, trailers loaded with thousands of pounds of equipment, room after room of gear such as search cameras, chemical detection units and interoperable, encrypted portable radios that cost $8,000 each.

In the early days, each task force had a band of “scroungers” as we called them. Their networking was as important as their ability to convince others of our cause and, short of stealing, they practiced creative procurement in both the name of progress and building each team and the NRS.

As I recall, our original grant award was less than $100,000 based upon a hard match dollar-for-dollar format. Today, each task force legitimately requires annual operating costs around $1.5 million just to maintain effective readiness.

A Joint Effort
With 56 deployable positions that had to be backed up three deep for a total of 168 team members, it was clear from the beginning that our agency, although the sponsor, could not succeed alone. Prior to the actual grant submittal, which required personnel commitments, our fire chief had secured commitments from other fire agencies within our county while I secured many of our civilian professionals such as doctors, structural engineers, heavy equipment operators, dog handlers and communications personnel.

Once we were selected as a task force, it became my job to both quantify and validate those commitments, turning them into real names on a roster. Those who originally volunteered for the program share the credit for both their commitment to something new and for the early success of the team. Their involvement became a force multiplier and would eventually lead to a larger group of key individuals from multiple agencies and backgrounds that would move not only our team forward but all of the task forces who fostered similar groups.

Those pioneers would eventually create the system we enjoy today and their collective innovations, collaboration, collective experiences and efforts would make USAR a known asset and household term, eventually changing and improving how the nation responds to disasters.

Training Days
Back then, as now, the task forces would be nothing more than glorified and organized firefighters and civilian technicians with better equipment if they weren’t well trained and started to work together.

My final task was to find a suitable training center, which I located along the San Francisco Bay behind a Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) sub-station in the City of Menlo Park. The multi-acre site was overgrown and impacted by high tides and heavy rain, but it was large and remote with an overgrown and abandoned 100' x 100' fenced-in area. It was the ideal training ground, and after some wrangling, I secured the fenced-in area in a lease agreement for $1 per year for a 5-year period.

I quickly recruited many of our team members who had a construction background and, as a group, we spent many hours of off-duty time building props, tunnels, a rubble pile, bleachers and buildings. What we lacked in funds we more than made up for in creativity, often working with contractors and construction companies to secure a hot load of concrete here, a broken electrical vault there or lumber that in most cases would’ve seen the dump had we not asked for it, but we were happy to have it and we used it all to build a “disaster city.”

Training Today
What started out as small fenced-in area now encompasses the entire vacant multi-acre area. The rent is the same, but nearly 20 years later the training center has gone through numerous transformations that have allowed our team to focus on training specific to becoming an effective USAR task force.

We’ve also hosted other national task forces for various courses, including the Heavy Equipment and Rigging Course as well as shared our experiences and training with thousands of other firefighters, rescuers and members of our armed forces from throughout the state, nation and other countries, such as China, Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Canada and France.

My proudest moment occurred when we hosted simultaneous classes of hundreds of national and local rescuers at the training site, using cranes, heavy equipment and advanced breaching equipment. We had come such a long way since first finding that overgrown site near the Bay.

Conclusion
The early days of building a task force were exciting and rewarding, as well as exhausting and frustrating. It required tens of thousands of volunteer hours from many involved, and its true success was based upon a small group of dedicated if not fanatical individuals. But the calm of those early years would very shortly be challenged in ways we had never imagined as we received news of our first potential federal deployment. To read about this deployment, check out Part 3 of this series.

Harold Schapelhouman is a 28-year veteran firefighter with the Menlo Park (Calif.) Fire Protection District. At the start of 2007, he became the first internally selected fire chief in 21 years for his organization. Previously, he was the division chief in charge of special operations, which includes all district specialized preparedness efforts, the local and state water rescue program, and the local, state and national Urban Search and Rescue Program (USAR).

Schapelhouman was the task force leader in charge of California Task Force 3, one of the eight California USAR teams and one of the 28 federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS/FEMA) teams.

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