Drone technology helped search teams quickly find and rescue a hiker missing for days in Southern California's rugged Angeles National Forest.
The search began after an engineer on Mount Wilson noticed a car parked for days in a turnout on the mountain road north of Los Angeles and called sheriff's deputies. The agency got in touch with family members of the missing hiker, who confirmed he was missing.
A search that could have required days in the sprawling San Gabriel Mountains wilderness area lasted just a few minutes after drone operator Deputy Ryan Clarke, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, located 45-year-old Aleksander Novak Zemplinski at least 200 feet over the side of a road.
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"It was a very steep terrain, and so it was very hard for the search and rescue to get down to this terrain to look for this person," Clarke said.
Usually, crew members would need to lower searchers down the side of the cliff, bring them back up, and repeat the process.
"There's a mast that would come out of there, a steel cable about 800 feet long, and then we would safely winch rescuers down," said Steve Goldsworthy, the operations leader for the Montrose Search and Rescue Team. "So you can imagine just the set of that equipment getting rescuers down. Then we have to bring them back up 400 or 500 feet and search again."
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About 10 to 12 minutes after launching, Clarke could see Zemplinski on the live feed displayed on the device he used to guide the drone. He was perched on a ledge on the side of the cliff.
It was a precarious position.
"That was one of our biggest concerns, that he would fall down again fall down further, and we didn’t want that to happen," said Zemplinski.
Once they knew his location, team members lowered rescuers down to Zemplinski. He was disoriented and injured from the 300-foot tumble.
"This individual would probably not survive another night in that situation," Goldsworthy said. "No food, no water, in the full sun, already dehydrated, already injured."
Zemplinski is recovering at a hospital. The Detroit resident and his family told authorities he was traveling the United States, enjoying nature. It's not clear how long he was on the side of the cliff, but family members said they last heard from him on Sunday.
