Quads to the Rescue in Hamburg, NY
With personal experience as ATV operators, Ted Cheney and Tim Howard of the Hamburg VFD put their heads together to design rescue trailers that can be pulled behind All Terrain Vehicles. This effort became the STAR Team (South Towns 
ATV Response Team). What started as a simple idea has snowballed into a unique and regionally famous search and rescue team. Since 1997, the STAR team has been called out about 20 times for searches, brush fires and even a plane crash. They are prepared to respond to calls from anywhere in the state. On their ATVs, they can cover more ground faster, operate on very rough terrain and in snow, and maneuver easily in wooded areas.
The STAR Team has had opportunities to use thermal imagers on several occasions. Three of the searches were for Alzheimer’s patients who had wandered away from their homes. In two of these instances, the patients were found alive, and in the other incident, the patient was deceased when he was found.
In October in Orchard Park, New York, a mentally handicapped woman wandered away from a Halloween party at her group home, dressed as the queen of hearts. Walking toward a nearby dairy farm, she tripped over a barbed wire fence and rolled into the pasture, which had been spread with about three feet of fresh cow manure earlier in the day. The STAR team was called in mutual aid to the Orchard Park Fire Department when the police couldn’t locate her.
All five of the department’s ATVs and their operators moved quickly to search the rolling fields and forests surrounding the group home. Rescuers from Hamburg included Chief Ralph Spina, Assistant Chiefs Mike Bettcher and Tim Moses, EMS Chief Bridget O’Brien, Captain Ted Cheney and Firefighters Matt Dils, Dave Hustead, Rich Lunz and George Utz.
Working together with a Bullard thermal imaging camera, the team conducted an extensive search in about 15 minutes, which helped to narrow the area down to a cow pasture where the woman was found by Orchard Park firefighters. She had been there for several hours and was in early stages of hypothermia. Rescuers pulled her out of the manure and placed her in a medivac helicopter that took her to the hospital.
Cheney explains how the Bullard thermal imaging camera helped with this particular search. “The camera really helped with the speed of the search. Without it, we would have spent three or four hours to search the miles surrounding the pasture. With the camera, it was only a 15-20 minute ride,” he said.
In another search, Cheney was able to cover four miles of road at night in about ten minutes with a Bullard thermal imaging camera. Cameras have also helped the team quickly search corn fields from the perimeter, rather than going down every four rows and destroying some of the crops in the process.
Cheney explained how Bullard thermal imaging cameras can also help the team stay safe on the job. “Barbed wire fences can be deadly on an ATV. Cameras help us find them easily. We can also see ponds and lakes much easier,” he said.
The STAR Team has selected Bullard as their camera of choice. “We tried out several cameras, and the Bullard was easiest to hold, easiest to see, had a clearer picture and the battery life seemed much longer. The Bullard also seemed more sensitive as far as picking out ponds and barbed wire fences, and seemed to have a longer range.”
The Bullard TACSIGHT thermal imager for law enforcement has many applications beyond tactical operations. Searching for lost people, and detecting dangerous terrain, make TACSIGHT a very valuable tool for law enforcement