"Typically (though not always), these are searches for missing people. When incidents grow this large and extend over many days, management of the operation becomes very complex."

To put it mildly! Complexity, which usually involves media interest, is increased if the search subject is other than the usual young adult male, and the operations area is accessible to media crews. After about day four or five, alternative hypotheses rear their heads and you enter the "abducted by aliens" phase. In another day or two, you will begin to hear from psychics with their vision of events and circumstances. Sometimes these may be obvious scams, but often they are completely sincere. I was assigned to follow up with one such psychic on a prolonged, media heavy search. We traveled to the spot where we would located the subject in the psychics car, on the psychics gas, finding nothing (the area had been covered days before). We never reached a successful conclusion on this operation, and it still comes up occasionally.

Fortunately, most operations last less than 24 hours.....