Our ambitions include profiling individual organizations across and outside the country – and to try to develop some comparative measures of risk and readiness. Our principal, and selfish reason, is so that New York area – and particularly Brooklyn emergency responders, can learn from each other. But we’re detemined to do it so cleverly that it looks

like we’re providing information useful anywhere. For the moment – we’ll do this in an ad hoc way. Since the Barbecue Recipe heiress is, at the moment, visiting her folks in Lawrence, Kansas, I thought I’d look a bit at emergency response teams in that neck of the woods. (It’s my understanding of the terms of my marriage, and family tradition, that, once I’ve mentioned Lawrence, I’ve also got to say “Go Jay Hawks!” So there it is). Following is the logo of Rampart Search and Rescue – a/k/a Kansas-Missouri Light Rescue Team.

I’ve not yet been able to get an interview with any of their officers, but I can tell you this:

• they’re incorporated as a (501) (c) (3) (we’re looking at this now as we do comparisons; we’ve learned, for instance, that New York has at least four specific types

  of nonprofits for emergency responders: volunteer fire departments, ambulance corps, fire protection corporations, etc. have specific provisions in the law. Distinctions which we’re not yet fully familiar.

• Rampart’s members include those with CERT training and NASAR certifications – which seems to us an excellent way of building volunteer emergency response organizations.
• their communications setup seems to be a combination ofUHF, VHF, ham, and paging equipment.
• they’ve got a useful set of reference files on a download page (we’ll be trying to assemble similar reference sets here in the near future)
• By definition – look at the name – they’ve decided not to be concerned about the fact that their area of operations crosses a state border.