Drug Ops

Today marks the end of the special operations that have been occurring all week near our district headquarters. We’ve had most of the Park’s law enforcement down there raiding marijuana gardens and monitoring the grower’s communications. It made for interesting chatter on the radio, though somewhat annoying when one needs to call out and the command channel is flooded with their traffic. The rest of us had to resort to the tactical channels, which, for whatever reason, Dispatch only infrequently monitors.

On Tuesday we had a Blackhawk come in to supplement the H1 Huey that was searching for suspect trails in the area (and, the unconfirmed report is, was shot at on Monday). Listening in, there was a lot of confusion over relaying locations between ground teams and the helicopters. For some reason indiscernible to me, they only resorted to gps coordinates after unsuccessfully attempting to describe locations with landmarks and rough distances. There was a lot of confusion over communications, in general. Quite often the field teams would have trouble reaching ICP, and vice versa. Apparently nobody sat down before the ops and marked the ideal locations to place the portable repeaters.

All in all, it was entertaining and enlightening listening, though it’s a comfort to have everyone back, no longer relying on only two Medics for the entire park.