Tracking equipment helps treacherous search

Dickinson County Sheriff's Deputy Josh Roberts displays a thermal imager used to help locate an injured snowmobiler who was injured in the dark of night on Big Spirit Lake. An emergency management grant offset the cost of the equipment for the sheriff's department. Roberts said its use shaved hours from a midwinter search.
(Photo by Russ Mitchell/DCN Staff)

That search began with a call from a worried husband at 12:38 p.m. in the early hours of Saturday, Feb. 27. Diane Ringquist of Jackson, Minn., was driving a 2000 Arctic cat snowmobile northbound.

The 50-year-old and her husband were returning to their cabin along Big Spirit Lake. Roberts thinks the woman's snowmobile collided with ruts caused by a pickup truck on the deep snow in the Marble Beach area.

"He lost sight of her," Roberts said. "I believe he went around the east side of the lake and she went through the middle. He got home and she wasn't there. So he called the comm center on 911 and reported that she had not been home."

Ringquist eventually called her husband from her cell phone. She was injured, she told him, and she didn't know where she was.

Dispatchers told the couple to have Ringquist call 911. The process allowed the communications center to use a GPS locater to narrow the search.

The effectiveness of the communication center's GPS varies depending on the quality of the cell phone used by the caller.

Standard phones can narrow the location to within a half mile. "Smart" phones do much better. Ringquist's did fairly well. They knew she was somewhere northeast of Marble Beach, "but that's all we knew," Roberts said.

The signal prompted Roberts to set up at the tents-only, overflow area of the Marble Beach campground, where he used the thermal imager obtained by the sheriff's department two years ago.

"I could just see a small speck out in the middle of the ice ..." Roberts said. "She was probably between a half and three-quarters of a mile away."

The thermal imager doesn't amplify what the person looks like, so Roberts called the husband, who was back out on the ice to help with the search. The deputy used the couple's snowmobile to follow that small speck among the ice shacks on Big Spirit Lake.

Ringquist's face shield had been broken and she didn't have her gloves on because she was using her phone.

The ambulance arrived at 1:24 a.m. or about 45 minutes after the 911 call came in to the communications center.

"Without this and the GPS, she would have been out there until morning," Roberts said.

A Homeland Security grant made the thermal imaging equipment possible. Roberts was trained to use it in Chicago.

"It's an amazing tool," he said. "We used it last fall to find a gentleman who had been in a car accident and was face-down in a hay field," Roberts said.

The estimated cost of an imager is $15,000-$20,000. The equipment is sensitive enough to tell responders if a driver had a passenger at the time of a car crash.

The snowmobilers were lucky, and careless, according to Roberts.

"They were both intoxicated," Roberts said. "One thing I would like to add, and probably should be mentioned is: Alcohol and snowmobiles do not mix."

The couple also separated -- a mistake for anyone swimming or sledding on a lake.

Ringquist was transported to LRH with non-incapacitating injuries. Roberts was assisted by Spirit Lake Police, LRH Ambulance, and Spirit Lake First Responders.