Late last week Minnesota got the call from Iowa for assistance on several levels to help deal with the effects of their flooding. One of the assets requested was a team from Minnesota’s All Hazard Incident Management Organization.
Eight highly trained and dedicated members left for Iowa last Sunday and are there for 10 days. All Hazard Incident Management Teams are a relatively new concept and the Minnesota Organization has only been around for about 3 years, there are 60 members in the organization and when a full team gets deployed it can have up to 14 people. The basic function of the team is to arrive at a destination where local capabilities have been exhausted, literally and figuratively and develop or enhance an organizational structure that will support getting the necessary work done to bring order to chaos. You can click on this link and read the articles on Oakville and other places that have suffered from the flooding.
One of the myriad of things that the Minnesota Team is organizing in Iowa is searching every structure to be sure there aren’t any unaccounted for people still inside. These could be victims that didn’t make it out, or victims that might have been washed into the structures during the time when the most severe flooding took place.
In order to conduct the searches the team called in several USAR Teams from the Minneapolis area. USAR stand for: Urban Search and Rescue. These teams are highly trained to search in challenging conditions in a methodical manner to insure that a factual accounting can take place.
Below is a picture of some members of the USAR team wading into a structure to begin a search. The picture was taken by Fire Inspector Scott Taylor. Scott is a member of the All Hazard Incident Team that was deployed. Scott’s role for this deployment is to be the Safety Officer.




