In June of 1999, the Cave Rescue Team was accepted as an
"Associate Member Team" of the Mountain Rescue
Association (MRA), certified in "Technical Rope
Rescue."The Sheriff's Cave Rescue Team in San Bernardino County is the only formally organized, trained and equipped, agency-affiliated rescue team dedicated to cave rescue in the State of California. The team was formed originally to serve as a dedicated response team for Mitchell Caverns State Park in 1988 and originally operated out of the Sheriff's Colorado River Station in Needles, CA. In 1993, the team was relocated to the Sheriff's Morongo Basin Station and in 1995, it was moved once again to it's current location at the Sheriff's Department Headquarters in San Bernardino, CA., where it is administratively attached to the Sheriff's Volunteer Forces Unit. The team currently has 14 'full-status' members.
In June of 1999, the Cave Rescue Team was accepted as an
"Associate Member Team" of the Mountain Rescue
Association (MRA), certified in "Technical Rope
Rescue."
In September of 2006, the team completed the "Search and Tracking" certification, and, in February 2008, the team completed the "Snow and Ice Rescue" certification, to become a "Full Member Team" of the MRA.
The Sheriff's Cave Rescue Team is made up entirely of volunteers. They pay for all of their own personal equipment. The team's rescue equipment is paid largely by their own fund-raising efforts.
In addition, the team has several fund-raising items for sale. One of the more interesting for outdoor-oriented people is their partnership with MyTopo.com which provides a custom, waterproof topo map. Click on the name to see what this is all about!
Conservation and Cave RescueThe San Bernardino Cave Rescue Team strongly endorses the National Speleological Society (NSS) Cave Conservation policy, which states in part: "that caves have unique scientific, recreational, and scenic values; that these values are endangered by both carelessness and intentional vandalism; that these values, once gone, cannot be recovered; and that the responsibility for protecting caves must be assumed by those who study and enjoy them." All contents of a cave -- formations, life, and loose deposits--are significant for its enjoyment and interpretation. Therefore, caving parties should leave a cave as they find it. They should provide means for the removal of waste; limit marking to a few, small and removable signs as are needed for surveys; and, especially, exercise extreme care not to accidentally break or soil formations, disturb life forms or unnecessarily increase the number of disfiguring paths through an area.
Most of the team consider themselves to be cavers and strongly disapprove of damaging caves. Conservation is strongly emphasized to new members. Cavers who hesitate to call for this rescue team in an emergency because they have visions of firemen in bulky turnout coats wearing rubber boots and carrying 6-cell Maglights blundering around in their favorite cave are badly mistaken. This teams strives to minimize impact on caves. For information on rescues, see the section "What to do in an Emergency" under "Safety Tips for Caving".
Cave rescue training & mission practices have evolved to ensure that impact to caves is minimized. It is the goal of the team that a visitor to the cave a week later would be unable to tell that a rescue training event had ever taken place there, and this philosophy extends to actual missions as well. Every effort will be made to minimize any kind of damage to a cave where an actual rescue mission takes place.
Because most cavers are very safety conscious, there have historically been relatively few calls for cave rescue in California. However, as more and more people become aware of caving as a sport through the entertainment and outdoor sports industry, this is in the process of changing. As the only team of its kind in the state, we can be called to respond to a rescue anywhere in California, or other states in the western US on very short notice. For major rescues, we can actually respond anywhere in the country, but with the resources available east of the Mississippi, we don't expect calls in that region. It would not be out of the question for us to have a mission out of the country, however.
This is also a general purpose SAR team, so if members wish, they may also participate in above-ground SAR missions as well. We have responded to airplane crash searches, mountain rescues, mine rescues, evidence searches, over-the-side recoveries in the mountains, and natural disasters, and will continue to do so in the future. However, our members can limit their call-out responses to strictly cave rescue missions.