What goes in to finding a missing person

CLAY COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – For over 48 hours, an Oktibbeha County woman was lost in the woods of rural Clay County.

Fortunatly, Victoria Hudson was found safe Saturday morning.

Dozens of trained first responders and even more volunteers combed the area near where her car was found.

Drones, helicopters and other tech was used, alongside grid searches to cover the rough terrain.

But it all begins with training.

Emergency responders start preparing for a missing person situation long before the call is ever made.

When a call comes in, EMA directors like Torrey Williams immediately start calling in help from the Mississippi Taskforce. They set up a command post, and direct other searchers.

“It was a lot of resources. We had different people, the ATVs of the different fire department, the law enforcement agency’s brought… even the people of the community, the citizens brought their ATVs and their four-wheelers and everything we had people bring in their horses,” said Williams.

It’s also their responsibility to make sure volunteers and law enforcement stay safe.

“Before they’re able to go out we make sure that they had, we asked do you have snake boots? Do you have this, are you well prepared for walking great distances? We also had a med cart that was going back-and-forth, and we had different people taking water and things like that to them. So, they didn’t have to walk all the way back out. They could just walk back to the secondary post and get those things,” Williams explained.

But the training often doesn’t compare to the real thing. West Point Fire Chief Wilbourne says that they learned a lot during the search.

“The biggest thing we learned on this one was how everyone came together and how cooperative everybody was in all this… the homeowners, the landowner, he went above and beyond everything with all this he basically turned over his house his shop for three-four days,” said Wilbourne.

There were between 100 to 150 people out looking for Victoria on Friday and Saturday.

She has since been released from the hospital.