Out here in Cali it's pretty easy to get around without a car - relative to most other places I've lived. There are bicycle lanes, the weather is perfect, etc.
So when I stumbled on this story (video) of a woman who had been missing for seven or eight days, after leaving work, on the overnight shift, having to drive a nine-mile stretch of road that is woodsy and curvy and in a couple of spots not-overly-populated - I kinda thought to myself, 'wow - why didn't someone look there earlier?'.
Well, of course, someone did, but they probably didn't do it on foot, or maybe even bicycle. Well, why not?
My guess would be because Americans don't do stuff out of their cars. Being outside of one's car on a road is just not comprehensible to most Americans.
The take-away? If you decide to look for someone who probably fell asleep at the wheel and crashed their car into dense brush, how about getting the fuck out of your car? Walk it. Bike it. Skateboard it. Whatever - just don't drive it. You won't find what you're looking for.
Eight days. Unreal.
...and today we have these things called the internets and Google Maps and Google Earth. The first thing I did when I saw this article was to plot her likely path home on Google Maps. If I was actually interested in finding her I would have plotted it in Google Earth, saved the route out to a .kzm file, and then distributed it using Google Earth's built-in distribution system, as well as the blogosphere, etc. Me and a couple of friends could have searched 10 miles of roadway in a few hours. I could do it myself - possibly jogging occasionally, carefully combing the landscape, in a day, two tops. With Google Earth it is _very_ easy to spot the five or six locations along the entire route from the store to downtown Maple Valley (no idea where she and hubby actually lived) where a sleepy person might have lost control of the car and ran off the road - they're all on that Route 169. If you subscribe to Google Earth you can actually get all sorts of crazy details. The article mentions that she went off the road below Southeast 196th Street - that's one of the obvious hotspots on the Google Earth Map - though, I would have guessed just north of that location. When looking for a possible off-road situation, you'd know that people tend to wake up too late, overcorrect, and then actually go off their _own_ side of the road - so you'd search each hot spot area well, on both sides of the road. Import this .kzm file and use Google Earth to actually fly her route towards her home. Welcome to the internets, detective. No phone records necessary. No search warrants necessary. No 8-day suffering period necessary. No outrageous hospital expenses necessary. No emotional pain and distress for family and friends necessary. No multi-man, multi-day, multi-expensive search party necessary.
...confirmed:
Tom Rider said he also drove the route where his wife was found but didn't see any sign of a crash. He also offered a $25,000 reward for any information leading to her safe return.
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