Missing sister - help me find her car?
Discussion
skwdenyer said:
A year ago today, my Sister went missing. Today we’re no further forward: no sightings, no vectors, no remains, no end to the emotional rollercoaster or the family pain. Not helped by the untimely death of another close family member in January.
If any other PHers have suffered a loss remotely like this, you have my greatest sympathies.
My loss is different. I, sadly, know what's happened to my sister - to not know at all must be just... well I can't express how poorly I would do/cope in such a position.If any other PHers have suffered a loss remotely like this, you have my greatest sympathies.
Edited by skwdenyer on Sunday 16th June 20:26
You have my deepest and heartfelt sympathy on this unthinkable situation
Edited by DodgyGeezer on Monday 17th June 09:12
skwdenyer said:
A year ago today, my Sister went missing. Today we’re no further forward: no sightings, no vectors, no remains, no end to the emotional rollercoaster or the family pain. Not helped by the untimely death of another close family member in January.
If any other PHers have suffered a loss remotely like this, you have my greatest sympathies.
Still thinking your family, we got reminded of how distressing this was, when a friend of our daughter went missing recently (fortunately found after a couple of days).If any other PHers have suffered a loss remotely like this, you have my greatest sympathies.
Our thoughts are with you.
Thank you for all the kind words.
For those with any interest (either in this case, or in finding people in general), this is the sort of terrain we're dealing with:
The bracken is around waist height or higher (meaning somebody laying in the bracken a metre or two to the side of you would be invisible) and with dense fronds (meaning drone searching has to be carried out at bracken-top height). The trees are so densely-planted as to in places be all-but impossible to get between - we need Star Wars style "orbs" able to autonomously navigate through the trees to search properly.
The aerials shots above are from my drone. As you can see, it is incredibly hard to conduct any sort of aerial search. By the time the bracken has died down, snow appears, or the weather is so bad as to prevent flying.
Nevertheless, this terrain has been searched extensively out to about 900 metres radius from where her car was found. To search fully the potential area (2 hours' walk, so say up to 5 miles' radius) is an area of over 200 million square metres, of which about 75% is land which can be properly and completely searched in metre-wide strips at the rate of as low as 2000 square metres per hour. Even at 4000 sq m / hr, that's 37,500 man-hours, or over 20 man years (working full time hours with breaks).
Hence I'm still investigating what additional aerial tech may be used to fully rule out her remains being present on land. And why I'm so interested in the tech problem more generally to help ensure this never happens to anyone else.
As for the water, extensive sonar searching has been carried out in the relevant areas, but by no means the whole Loch. Again, the problem is time and resource. Water-borne "drones" (ROVs in aquatic parlance) do exist, but the Loch is not the clear waters of the Bahamas. It *might* be possible to "fingertip" search the Loch bed with an ROV, but I don't yet know how to get that done with available resources.
Now, if anyone has any friends at the NSA or similar who could get me access to really high-resolution satellite imagery for specific dates, that would be terrific...
For those with any interest (either in this case, or in finding people in general), this is the sort of terrain we're dealing with:
The bracken is around waist height or higher (meaning somebody laying in the bracken a metre or two to the side of you would be invisible) and with dense fronds (meaning drone searching has to be carried out at bracken-top height). The trees are so densely-planted as to in places be all-but impossible to get between - we need Star Wars style "orbs" able to autonomously navigate through the trees to search properly.
The aerials shots above are from my drone. As you can see, it is incredibly hard to conduct any sort of aerial search. By the time the bracken has died down, snow appears, or the weather is so bad as to prevent flying.
Nevertheless, this terrain has been searched extensively out to about 900 metres radius from where her car was found. To search fully the potential area (2 hours' walk, so say up to 5 miles' radius) is an area of over 200 million square metres, of which about 75% is land which can be properly and completely searched in metre-wide strips at the rate of as low as 2000 square metres per hour. Even at 4000 sq m / hr, that's 37,500 man-hours, or over 20 man years (working full time hours with breaks).
Hence I'm still investigating what additional aerial tech may be used to fully rule out her remains being present on land. And why I'm so interested in the tech problem more generally to help ensure this never happens to anyone else.
As for the water, extensive sonar searching has been carried out in the relevant areas, but by no means the whole Loch. Again, the problem is time and resource. Water-borne "drones" (ROVs in aquatic parlance) do exist, but the Loch is not the clear waters of the Bahamas. It *might* be possible to "fingertip" search the Loch bed with an ROV, but I don't yet know how to get that done with available resources.
Now, if anyone has any friends at the NSA or similar who could get me access to really high-resolution satellite imagery for specific dates, that would be terrific...
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