Family Liaison in Search and Rescue

Moose Mutlow 0:02

I like the idea of the family liaison officer being the incident commander's representative to the family . Quite often there's a breakdown on incidents or missions . You're focused on trying to resolve a missing person and trying to scale up to do the appropriate search . Sometimes the family is just kept on a back burner . What the family liaison officer does is it actually pulls it up , escalates it to a point where it has a direct but controlled line to the incident commander so that information can flow both ways .

Tom Mueller 0:34

That clip you just heard is from our guest today who's an expert in search and rescue operations around the Yosemite National Park here in the US . A bit more detail on our guest in just a moment and we just have one quick recognition item for us today . This podcast has been recognized by the folks at Feedspot as the number 13 podcast in the state of Texas for management podcasts .

Tom Mueller 1:03

Again , that's the good folks over at Feedspot who aggregate global media outlets and content creators , making us easier to find for others who are looking for those kinds of services . So thanks to the folks at Feedspot for that recognition for the podcast today . I'm Tom Mueller , with me again today , my friend and co-host , mark Mullin . Our guest today is Moose Mutlow , who since 2002 , has been a member and a senior trainer for Yosemite Search and Rescue . One of the busiest search and rescue operations in the world , yosemite National Park entertains nearly 4 million visitors a year . Moose has two books to his credit , both written around his experiences in the search and rescue field , one of which focuses more specifically around the family liaison officer role . Now , neither Mark or I were particularly familiar with family liaison role from our crisis experiences , mostly in the corporate settings , so it's quite an educational conversation with Moose . So , moose , welcome to the podcast .

Moose Mutlow 2:14

Thank you very much for having me along .

Tom Mueller 2:17

Now you have . You've got a kind of an interesting background . You've worked in the outdoor space for really your whole adult life and obviously you've developed a deep passion for the outdoor space , for hiking , you know , and you've been doing search and rescue for a long time . I was fascinated just to kind of tap your brain earlier when we spoke around the whole family liaison officer role , because when you get into search and rescue missions oftentimes there's negative outcomes from those search and rescues and so the family liaison officer becomes quite critical . In that , tell us a little bit , what does that officer do and what are those big challenges ?

Moose Mutlow 3:02

I like the idea of the family liaison officer being the incident commander's representative to the family . Quite often there's a breakdown on incidents or missions . You're focused on trying to resolve a missing person and trying to scale up to do the appropriate search . Sometimes the family is just kept on a back burner . What the family liaison officer does is it actually pulls it up , escalates it to a point where it has a direct but controlled line to the incident commander so that information can flow both ways . Essentially , by having that position work effectively , you avoid that moment on media where a family says we don't know what's going on and that's the telling point that you haven't fully integrated them into some sort of compassionate , empathetic and objective communication strategy .

Marc Mullen 3:54

So does that ? Then it sounds like it's another stakeholder group , as is media or elected officials and so on . So do you fit in liaison or is it an independent support box in the org chart ?

Moose Mutlow 4:08

So if you look at the org chart , quite often it'll see PIO and liaison and actually the family liaison is hidden behind that . It should be a separate one , and that brought up to the same level of accessibility to information

Family Liaison in Search Operations

Moose Mutlow 4:22

.

Tom Mueller 4:22

Moose , I know when we've spoken before you've talked about some of the cases that you've worked in search and rescue . I wonder if there's a story or two you could share with us around incidents you've worked in and how does the family liaison officer engage with search and rescue teams ? Got family members around ? What is that dynamic like ?

Moose Mutlow 4:46

Well , the key piece is to have accessibility to information . You're sitting in all the briefs . You're able to talk to the planning chief about what's going on with the action plan . You're starting to gauge how the IC is moving forward and then you're taking that information and delivering it in a way that a family can digest For an extended assignment . You're going to have , really early on , a lot of contact with the family . You might be talking with them every other hour to start to give them an idea about what's happening out there .

Moose Mutlow 5:17

As you scale up and put more feet on the ground and as it goes through to that point of actually not seeing something after two or three days , you're starting to scale down and actually actually getting family to a position where they accept less information . They're getting to the point where they understand that there's probably not going to be a good outcome on this . It's a tempered exercise . You're dealing with the emotions of a family and what they need and some of those needs that you simply can't meet . You've got to talk to them about that and also realize that you report directly to the IC . You're not an advocate , you're a liaison A very critical part of understanding how to run the role well .

Tom Mueller 5:59

Well , now , if I had a loved one who was missing in one of the big parks and I have a 28-year-old daughter who is an avid hiker , loves to travel , been through Yosemite numerous times , you know if she went missing , you know I would want to be out there on the hunt and doing part of the search activity . Do you let family members get involved in that piece of it ? Do you let family members get involved in ?

Moose Mutlow 6:23

that piece of it . There are times that we've had families out there because they've got themselves organized and they've got a high enough level of personal management . They've been in the outdoors enough to not be a risk . Obviously it starts to get a little bit more complicated if you're in technical terrain and very few families can participate with that sort of vertical exposure . But we've had families out on the edge having some level of monitored role in searches .

Moose Mutlow 6:49

I think there's also a responsibility on the IC's end is if you know or you feel that there's going to be that negative outcome . It's a fatality . How do you best manage a family coming into that reality ? And one of the rules that we have is if we know we're doing a recovery in a known location , typically we'll stop the recovery . If the family turn up on scene , our attention will turn to the family . We'll manage the family and then , once the family leaves the scene , we'll start again to maybe do that car extraction or pull a body out the river .

Moose Mutlow 7:23

And that's based on experience . It's a traumatic event that took the life and then it's a traumatic event for the family to watch the body be recovered and it's a traumatic event for the rescuers because if they're dealing with that emotional deluge that's coming from the family , that becomes a really heavy load to carry . So we're being careful for all the parties that are involved , and that's where the family liaison is part choreographer they're figuring out the best way to give information and move the family through a process . It's also air traffic control . There are all these pieces going on and use your experience to help figure out when to bring the family on the scene , when to pull them off , when to give a bit more installation to the rescuers . And that's all done in careful coordination with the incident commander .

Marc Mullen 8:09

Out here . A lot of our law enforcement agencies have what they call the support officer position . That sounds sort of like this , except of course it's a different setting . You're not up in the hills , You're on the street , but it's the same idea of having someone there to care for the family . What's the training behind this ? How do you get into this ? Maybe how did you get into it ? And then , when we're out there in responses and we're seeing a need for someone like you , it'd be nice to know who to look for .

Moose Mutlow 8:37

You're definitely attracted to this type of work , probably because of communication skill . I come from a background of guiding and working in social work-esque environments , so a lot of communication , a lot of trying to figure out how to work well with people , to listen to people . That was my background and then over the years , just being in the outdoors , you deal with a lot of accidents and deaths . I had a lot of experience that could be tapped into for the search and rescue in the national park . We run up to a 16-hour training for qualified people so they might do the ICS training online to get them understanding that system if they've been exposed to it . But most times it's skills that people bring in maturity or previous experience of working in around the health industry or within law enforcement . You've got to be really good at striking a balance , a compassionate , empathetic , objectivity . You're not a grief counselor , you're not a therapist . You're delivering difficult information in a way that people at that moment could digest it and do something with it .

Tom Mueller 9:41

So empathy obviously is a critical factor of being in that kind of role . Gosh , one of the real challenges I would think is delivering that bad news when there's a bad outcome for a family . What's your experience with that and how do you work through sort of the emotional stress of having to deliver that kind of news to a family ?

Moose Mutlow 10:06

We stage it . If we have an outcome where we know we have to do a notification of death , I'll work really , really hard to get my law enforcement uniform person in there with me who's going to deliver this short , succinct but caring message about the loss of their loved one , and then they'll express their condolences and they'll remove themselves from the scene and then are coming behind to essentially help deal with the mess that that creates . I think a lot of times when we talk about death culturally , it's uncomfortable for everybody involved and there isn't always a neat way of doing it . But the key piece in all of those deliverers is keep it short , be precise and leave somebody in no doubt that the worst thing has happened .

Tom Mueller 10:53

Yeah , there's no sort of sugarcoating this , talking around it , right ?

Moose Mutlow 10:57

You can't . You can't say things like they're in a better place or they're not in pain anymore . These are very presumptive sentences , presumptive words . I tell families , I'm going to give them a single , undeniable truth . So I'm going to back up all the facts they give them . I'm going to test them three times to make sure they're right . And if I don't know the answer to something , I'm not going to tread into that area . I had a mother who asked me about what her son's last moments were like and I said I don't know . No-transcript , he was not alone . I knew that because I talked to the people on scene . I'd been on scene and I knew I could hear them saying his name . And those are , when you've got that sort of fact to a mother , that they could hold on to that . But to say any of these other presumptive pieces is very dangerous . I don't think . I think you end up serving yourself more . You end up serving the family .

Marc Mullen 12:03

I come into this from the other end a little bit , because in my wife's family her brother was killed in a mountain climbing accident , and so we were at the other end of that , being the family , trying to figure out what in the world happened . That went from a nice , warm July afternoon to being in the hospital at 11 pm . And it resonates with me what you're saying , because if you start trying to accommodate the speculation , there's just no end to it , and if you're in a position where people are starting to think if only they'd done something a bit different , it doesn't change the outcome .

Moose Mutlow 12:38

People are like starting to think if only they'd done something a bit different , it doesn't change the outcome . And in the outdoors , where so much of it has happened unseen and it happens in a moment , people can have an event just in front of them on the trail and having and have three people have three different memories about what just happened . The outcome's the same , but then mechanism and the sort of story leading up is a little bit different and we share that without necessarily saying well , that person's version is better than that person's . We leave it to the family to negotiate that .

Marc Mullen 13:05

Do you end up sharing with the family about the process of the search and rescue part as well ?

Moose Mutlow 13:12

Oh yeah , absolutely With technology . Now I will pull out all of the downloaded data sets . They will show very detailed traverses that show where someone with a little gps has done this minute search and you see the the depth of detail that has been undertaken by a specific group on a grid search . But then at that moment you can also start to see the enormity of the task . To look under every boulder in a massive talus field is an impossibility .

Moose Mutlow 13:43

So I use technology a lot and in the past we put people up in helicopters to overflight , do an overflight that has application . It isn't something that I would typically do . That's an exception to the rule . It isn't something that I would typically do . That's an exception to the rule . You need to give them as much information as you can , as much to highlight what seems to be working and where we're sort of starting to say , oh , this area isn't a hot area anymore , but also to show that dog teams don't always find people . They're a good PR exercise a lot of times because we see them on the ground working . In an urban setup they have fantastic success , but out in the woods they have limited exposure , limited use , and it's I talk through that and have the operations chief come in and talk through those details .

Tom Mueller 14:30

From your experience what the sort of instigating factors for most of the search and rescue are the incidents that you work out in the national parks ?

Moose Mutlow 14:40

Overestimating your ability and underestimating the challenge . That's kind of the formula is that people arrive pretty excited about their TikTok and Instagram opportunity and they'll be really focused on getting to the top of that peak . But they'll be carrying half a liter of water and some salty snack and it isn't enough for that 12 or 13 hour undertaking . But that's part of learning to be in the outdoors . The problem is maybe that it was . Those are lessons that we might have learned when we were eight or nine years old in our backyards and we were only a half mile away from the house when we discovered that we had inadequate supplies . Now people , because they have less exposure to the outdoors , are learning it later , as young adults maybe , or even older , and they just haven't got that depth of experience . And I think that one of the things that we need to do when people have those epics is not humiliate them or embarrass them , is explain them and educate them so they can be safer on their next event oh , is there .

Tom Mueller 15:42

This is a question my daughter asked me to ask you is do you see different mistakes between different ages or generation of hikers out there ?

Moose Mutlow 15:52

well , young men I mean they're their own . Significant proportion of every accident , like the way that young men's brains develop , is I am indestructible and I always say that when I'm out , when I'm out training , and I see a group come by and we'll stop and chat , because that one of the things we do when we're training is stop training , talk to people , make a good visitor contact , go back to training and I'll say if I see a group of young men , I'm like , you're my , my demographic . You're the ones who are going to have the exit , you're the ones that will go to the edge . You will be the ones that jump out on that rock . You will be the rock . They all are and 99.9% of the time they're young men and they do fine .

Emotional Impact and Trauma in Rescue

Moose Mutlow 16:33

I think the older hikers fall into that piece where they may underestimate where they're at physically . So they , what they did when they were 30 and 40 , they can't do in their 60s and 70s a little bit different . And then there's a another group that is is a cross-age . It's just a disconnect with what , where their bodies are at and what the wilderness is like , the idea that everything's a curated experience that's controllable , that if we have an accident , an ambulance can drive up here , and actually your ambulance is a horse and it's going to take six hours for you to come out in a very uncomfortable fashion , bumping up and down . So there isn't necessarily the filter that says I'm not going to jump off of this rock , I'm going to climb down off the rock . I'm going to do what I do when I'm just wandering around the neighborhood jumping off something . I'm just going to do it here . And rolling your ankle four miles up the trail with two and a half thousand feet to come down is a very different undertaking .

Marc Mullen 17:38

so it's a lack of understanding in that moment have you seen your work go sideways in a response where the families didn't cooperate or the media decided to make something bigger out of it and subjected the families to challenges , embarrassment or whatever , or on ?

Moose Mutlow 17:58

the fact they built against you . They're a little bit different . I mean , if they push back on a family liaison , you just step aside and somebody else goes in , or you put an investigator in it's , it's and there's no judgment on it . They're , they're in crisis , so they get . They get a pass and we find the best way to meet their needs .

Moose Mutlow 18:17

I we do a lot of briefing around media , particularly with a major , about how , if they choose to have media involved , we'll help them figure out how to reach out and contact and we'll do a little bit of chaperoning . I won't , but the Park Service public affairs person will help shepherd them . But I wouldn't say we've had particularly negative . There are moments where you'll have families that are disappointed and they'll put a public appeal out for underwater resources for diving and they won't understand that actually to dive in a swift water environment , for a whitewater environment at altitude , there's probably three people that can do it nationally and then they have to get all that supply up there and the only way they can do it is an overflight . It's just born out of desperation , it's not bloody mindedness .

Moose Mutlow 19:02

It's people in crisis . You meet families where they're at . I think sometimes we forget we have this agenda of search , that search , and we actually have two parallel tracks . We have the search and the mission and we have looking after the family and they kind of are on the same trajectory .

Tom Mueller 19:18

Wildfires are a thing that's been in the news a lot lately .

Moose Mutlow 19:30

And I wonder do you get involved with fire service issues at all ? We train our engine crews on Swiftwater Rescue each year because they're a really good resource . So they'll do a refresher on that . And I've been on one major fire where I ran the river operation for the ferguson fire , where you're trucking firefighters across the river safely to get to either build fire lines or maintain hose lights what have have you ? But I think everything's becoming more closer and closer in coordination and it's inescapable , with the frequency at which fire is kicking off , that you don't have SAR operations running with a fire-based event .

Tom Mueller 20:13

I'm curious , because you're dealing so much with emotions and there's a lot of stress involved with engaging with family members and that does . Does PTSD become a thing for folks in your role who deal with families and how do you assess that ? How do you deal with that ?

Moose Mutlow 20:38

I think PTSD is the ugly , untalked-about secret for so long .

Moose Mutlow 20:42

Generationally , this accumulative trauma of watching or participating in these events has had devastating effect on law enforcement , emergency workers , fire .

Moose Mutlow 20:55

Now we have a little bit more understanding about how trauma works and so we work pretty hard around something called the stress continuum , which is essentially a tool that was evolved by the Marine Corps to look at whether people are combat ready , and it's been now revised to meet the need of the responder community and it essentially allows you to have a self-diagnostic to say , hey , I'm in this position , where I'm ready , I'm performing , I'm in a healthy place , through to being critical , the fourth stage , the red stage , saying I'm actually injured , I'm unable to deal with complexity , is the one I always talk about . Uh , would you carry that ? And so now we do a lot more work of prepping people to recognize those problems and the idea of ptsi and p to recognize those problems and the idea of PTSI and PTSD injury over disorder is the idea that the injury has a little bit more of a less stigma attached to it , the idea you can recover from it and that could be a peer-based piece or change within the work environment , whereas a disorder needs a higher level of care .

Tom Mueller 21:55

Yeah , I like the way you sort of characterize that . You've got a post-traumatic stress injury , which you know it connotes like a first aid injury or something like that . As you said , that's treatable and manageable , whereas PTSD does feel more disorderly .

Moose Mutlow 22:13

Yeah , and that idea of you can bring yourself back . So for me , the thing I love to do is just sit on the river in a boat or be rafting or swimming or snorkeling . These are the things that really re-energize me and put me in a healthy place . That's in my green zone . If I've got all the way over into that critical zone , I'm not doing that anymore , I'm not looking after myself , and so a peer or my family can look at it and say you need to go to the river and I'll go to the river . And that 40-minute section is the start of recovery . And I think the intensity of being on multi-shift long call-outs multiple days on , unless you engineer that downtime , that recovery , that thing that you used to do , and include it back in your daily routine , that's where your trauma injury , you're not recovering . You're just stacking up and getting into that negative zone .

Moose Mutlow 23:03

I was in a workshop around the stress continuum and a light bulb went off and I realized where I was at on the continuum and next to me was an Iraqi war vet who'd been in Afghanistan as well and they too were at that critical area . They were deeply injured and we both got there and totally different pathways , but we had the same reaction and we had different ways of treating it . What a green zone was going to be ? But it , trauma is very personal . It's not a competition . One person's trauma is not any more valuable than anybody else's . It's a very individual thing . And then you have an individual treatment plan .

Marc Mullen 23:45

In our field , we prepare for things we sincerely hope never happen . In the law enforcement or your rescue field , you're always preparing for something that is going to happen , so I think that you're more aware of it because you deal with it on a much more regular basis . But , tom , to me the challenge is recognizing that our response isn't over when the incident's over , that we need to be thinking about personal care for the people that are involved . And in Deep Water Horizon , for example , there was plenty of stress and plenty of trauma floating around there and it was impacting everybody . The truth is , we're in an industry whose goal is to go home , but sometimes you go home but you're not done yet .

Moose Mutlow 24:29

Right , and I think that's where peer groups , the people who you work with it , actually maintain lines of communication and you don't say , hey , you okay , because you get a throwaway line , I am all right . It's say what did you do ? What do you do at the weekend ? And if the person just sat around with the curtain shut , hitting the bottle , they're not in a good place . But if they said , oh , I went for a picnic , I got out , I played a pickup game basketball you start to see this idea that they're in a healthier place and we as peers don't have to fix people . What we have to do is raise the flag and help them get the professional care that they need and remove the stigma of looking after yourself on that level so you can come back and perform at a high level again within your team .

Tom Mueller 25:18

Yeah , that's really really great advice , Moose , Thanks for sharing that .

Tom Mueller 25:22

I think most of us who've been through major incidents feel some level of post-traumatic stress injury and try to figure out how do we work through that and we all seem to muddle our way through or most of us do but it's good to know there's tools out there that can actually help teams , management teams deal with their folks when they come back from work in a major incident like that . Hey , I want to switch gears real quick . Moose , you mentioned something earlier about training and I'm sort of fascinated by that , because you talked about training in public and then stopping your training when people are passing by , which it seems kind of like an interesting , almost you know a public relations way to do it . But you're actually helping educate people by being out there in public doing the exercises so a lot of what I do in the spring is swift water rescue training .

Moose Mutlow 26:17

So we're out in snowmelt rivers that are ripping by pretty quick , it's cold , it's dynamic , it's kind of exciting . And we go to areas that have high traffic foot traffic and we put a little safety zone up so we keep people back from the edge . We put a sandwich board up that explains what we're doing and I just get somebody who's in the training to keep their eye out and they rotate up to talk to members of the public if they stop and ask questions . And it's the best way to show hey , if you fall in this water at this time of the year , we've got all the gear on . Look how powerless we are .

Moose Mutlow 26:53

It's that experiential approach and it also makes it humor as well . It's that Iial approach and it also makes it humor as well is that I say , hey , if you have an accident , it's going to be me coming out and looking for you and I don't want to be put in that position . So my face is on there as , hey , when you have an accident , it isn't just you , it's the entire team you're exposing . And then , if we put a ship in the air , how dangerous is that . I mean , helicopters are designed to self-destruct and the pilots are trained to stop them from doing it . That's the nature of the helicopter . So when we start to put that responsibility onto onto park users , I kind of like that and I love looking at working with young people and sort of showing them in a dynamic sense what the power is . It's not an adult telling what's happening , they . They're watching somebody in a PFD , a flotation device , whip under a bridge at 20 miles an hour , and they know they're powerless in that moment . They understand that .

Tom Mueller 27:45

If somebody wants to get a hold of you for more information , what's the best way to reach you ?

Moose Mutlow 27:51

I've got a website wwwmoosemutlowcom website wwwmoosemutlowcom and I've got a couple of books out . There are out on amazon . When accidents happen is my book about family liaison work and I'm also on instagram at moose all right , moose .

Tom Mueller 28:09

Thanks for joining us on the podcast today , really uh informative , and it's really nice to know there's people like you out there willing to take the lead and help families in difficult situations they might face . So thanks very much for being with us .

Moose Mutlow 28:25

Thanks for the opportunity .

Tom Mueller 28:27

And that'll do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast . Thanks again for joining us Again , if you want to email the show , hit Tom at leadinginacrisiscom , and we'll catch you soon for another episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast .