Essential and Effective: Texas State Guard SAR’s Role in Today’s Emergencies

In this Commanders Briefing clip, Major General Roger O. Sheridan highlights the critical importance of the Texas State Guard's Search & Rescue (SAR) and Search and Recover teams. The discussion emphasizes how these specialized units play a vital role in saving lives during emergencies—especially relevant amid the devastating floods that struck Texas over the past week. General Sheridan shares insights into how SAR teams have proven their effectiveness not only during real-world missions but also during training events, where lives have been saved. The clip also explores how these teams work hand-in-hand with the Texas National Guard, providing crucial support during large-scale operations like Operation Lone Star.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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C McAdams, Sr. Colonel Phillip Smith, and other Patreon members.
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Speaker 2 (00:12):
I want to move over to search and rescue because
the search and rescue component of the Texas State Guard,
I feel is pretty big, mainly because I always see
it in the news. You guys have a repel tower,
and I always see your guys training and constantly training
and then getting going from master search and rescue training,

(00:34):
and it's it's very it seems like a very big program.
One question I did I do have is are the
search and rescue units that you have heavily utilized during
the natural disasters like hurricanes, flooding, and even during non
emergency situations like to localities that have missing persons.

Speaker 3 (00:59):
Well, it's it's so there's there's actually three parts to that.
So you're searching, rescue, search and recovery, and those those items.
One is our boat teams, UH, the other is DYE team,
and the other is the lands are or in search
and rescue, and so all three are tied together, but
each have a different mission set. UH. Search and rescue

(01:23):
on the land. I think it was just a couple
of months ago that some of our team was actually
in one of the state parks conducting actually this was
I think last summer, was conducting maneuvers and practicing and
they came across the person in distress and literally the
guy had was going down for Edith's Austin and was

(01:45):
able to conduct MANUVACU evacuations. And so even if in
our training we're making a difference. And so as far
as any natural disasters, tornadoes, hurricanes, periodically those will be
called out. Harvey was the last time that we really

(02:05):
utilized our boats, however, down on the border. Although we're
not in the boats on the border, they're heavily utilized
and we were part of that team as far as
providing providing some of our boats down there and some
of the training and things of that nature, working with
the National Guard