When the elderly woman with Alzheimer’s wandered away, the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office was called to find her. Ordinarily, the department would have gone into search-and-rescue mode, calling out volunteers and all available uniformed officers to search a wide area. This time, however, things were different.
Wandering is common among the more than 60,000 people in Colorado who have Alzheimer’s disease, Down syndrome, autism, dementia, mental retardation, traumatic brain injury and similar disorders that affect reasoning. In most jurisdictions, finding such a lost individual can take a search team many hours and run up significant costs to the taxpayers.
Now, however, a number of Colorado communities are able to locate wanderers far more quickly. The breakthrough comes as a result of Project Lifesaver, a national initiative that uses technology to safeguard vulnerable populations.
People at risk for wandering are fitted with plastic bracelets that include a radio transmitter, enabling rescue personnel to follow the bracelet’s signal day or nights. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson says the bracelets are similar to avalanche beacons.
The project was first implemented in Colorado in 2004 by Robinson’s office. Grants totaling $9,800 from the city of Centennial, Arapahoe County and Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Hospital paid for the bracelets and tracking equipment, and covered the cost of training officers and volunteers.
Since Project Lifesaver was implemented, the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office has followed radio beacons on more than 50 searches. The average search time for someone wearing a transmitter bracelet is down to minutes.
Robinson believes so strongly in the project that he has offered free training to search teams and law enforcement officials in other jurisdictions. Lakewood and Denver, Douglas, Jefferson, Larimer, Mesa and Boulder counties have taken him up on the offer. The $2,800 cost of training, he believes, can better be used by other jurisdictions to offset the cost of buying the bracelets and tracking equipment.
Most of the jurisdictions charge about $275 for the bracelets (with the charge forgiven if a family cannot pay), plus a small monthly fee to cover changing the batteries. Despite the cost, Lakewood’s Volunteer Program Coordinator, Leilani Peterson, says their department has been “bombarded” with requests since the program began there in 2005.
Mike Kirkland, Douglas County deputy sheriff, says his department has seven uniformed officers and approximately 30 volunteers trained in the technology. He tells of a 16-year-old with autism whose bracelet led rescuers to where he wandered near “very busy, very dangerous” South Santa Fe Boulevard.
And what of the elderly woman who wandered away in Arapahoe County? Robinson’s deputies tracked her to a nearby ice cream shop.
Other jurisdictions should look hard at the Project Lifesaver model and consider how much safer it could make vulnerable people, as well as how much it could save in human misery, search and rescue time, and costs to the taxpayers.
Susan Thornton (smthornton@aol.com) served 16 years on the Littleton City Council, including eight years as mayor. Her column appears twice a month.
