I'm not a SAR expert either, but a 1-mile radius translates to over 3 square miles, or almost 8 square kilometres.

Simply throwing a bunch of untrained volunteers together and saying "go search this area" is a recipe for disaster. First of all, they may not even be able to search the right section; I volunteered for the local candidate in our recent federal election, and we had volunteers who dropped flyers off in the wrong section of town, even with a map and a street address, so I wouldn't trust most volunteers with a topo map and a GPS unit.

Checking the volunteers to make sure they were properly dressed, and not likely to get lost themselves (in the dark, in the woods, and in sub-freezing temperatures), takes time. Walking past the kid in the dark, if he's sleeping or hiding, is a definite possibility; so is searching the wrong area (see above) and trampling potentially valuable clues. (I've heard of volunteers picking up discarded candy wrappers they found and sticking it in their pockets without telling anyone, unaware that it might be a vital clue.)

Given a line of trained searchers, 10 meters apart, 100 searchers could take a couple of hours to properly search a square kilometre.

And all that assumes that they *knew* the missing person was within one mile.

I think 21 hours to get organized, get the volunteers on site, make sure they were trained and equipped, move them into position, and conduct the search is properly pretty good going.

But I'm not an expert. Just MHO.