That depends on what sort of SAR you are talking about. In Canada there are three types of SAR: air, marine, and ground and inland waterway. Air and marine SAR fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of National Defence (hadled by the Coast Guard and the Air Force). Ground and inland waterway SAR is the responsibility of the local police authority, usually the RCMP, but it may be city PD, or provincial police force.
A typical ground and inland waterway search would progress like this (in BC anyway):
Little Johnny goes missing, so his mom calls the RCMP. The RCMP will refer it to either a general duty constable, or the rural patrol constable for the area. The constable will respond and determine if SAR should be called. He then calls the watch commander who calls Emergency Coordination Centre (ECC) in Vancouver (it doesn't always happen like that, but its typical). ECC then rings the pagers on those of us in the group who carry them, and a search manager calls ECC back to get details on the search and determine the required course of action. The search manager will then ring our pagers again with more info, and will contact the call out person who would initiate a group call out. From there we would respond and carry out the search or rescue. Being volunteers, civillian SAR pers. don't have duty shifts or anything like that, if available they go when called.
A typical air search (in BC) looks like this:
Air traffic services has an overdue flightplan, or distress call, so after contacting all of the aiports aloairportsintended route of flight, they will call Rescue Coordination Centre (RCC, the military version of ECC) in Victoria. ECC, depending on the location and availability of military assets may either send a military aircraft, or may dispatch a civillian aircraft from the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association (CASARA) to fly the route of flight looking for an ELT signal, or smoke etc. If this initial search is unsuccessful then ECC will either task CASARA to set up a search headquarters, or will assign a military search master to do the same. From there the search would progress, calling in available military and civillian assecivilianer all of the search areas in detail.
I'm not sure how a marine search goes (thats not my department!), but I'd imagine that it would look fairly similar to an air search. Perhaps one of our resident SAR Techs can fill us in on that.
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