*** This is a continuation of my interview with Brian, without preamble. I *highly* recommend listening to Part 1 first.

Brian Paulsen is assistant police chief in Sturgis, South Dakota. He co-wrote a chapter in Forensic Archaeology based on his Master’s thesis about landfill searches in the United States.

In this episode we talk about:

More information about the Nebraska landfill search can be found here:

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Transcript, Part 2

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, so a search protocol was established through 9/11.

Brian Paulsen: Correct.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you know anybody else like that, is that the kind of standard now for searching either catastrophes or any time there’s a lot to sift through?

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, literally and figuratively. Yes. That’s one thing that I didn’t, that I wish I had inquired about and what was their methodology to searching in the landfills and such. A couple of them volunteered and they seemed to do something very similar. They brought the trash out. There are a couple that actually just sent investigators or law enforcement only in to the landfill and they would search an area and then they would be done. There’s not a lot of, I don’t have a lot of information on what others did as far as their methodology.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It sounds like is a bit of a continuum too in search methods.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, so from our previous conversations, it sounds like this case that where you had to go in and search the landfill for this boy, prompted you to then do research on landfill searches.

Brian Paulsen: So I came out of the landfill, which it really consumed, basically eight months of my life. And the whole investigation had – there were nights out driving around saying okay, maybe went there, just letting your mind kind of take you and not really saying, okay I got to put it into this –so I was working 18, 20 hour days, sleeping for about four and then getting up again.

I got done with this case in August and we knew we had the trial coming up the next spring, but I had all this time on my hands and I thought, “what am I gonna do?” I had always thought about getting my Master’s degree and I had taken a crime scene, a year-long crime scene course that was put on by a community college in conjunction with the hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, the state capitol. Nebraska Wesleyan had taken that over and that turned it into a Master’s program. One of the instructors, and eventually the dean of the program, was one of our searchers. She came out. Her background is in archeology and specifically forensic archeology. Dr. Connor. She came out and searched only one day, maybe two. She was one of those that had to get back because of commitments, so I drove her back down to her car, and she was saying, “hey, this is my background, I think what you’re doing is exactly how it should be done. Just continue. If there’s anything you need help with or questions, just let me know.” And really we had, that was kind of where we had really formed our relationship.

After I’d got done with the case, I said, let’s get into forensics, and it was right there in Lincoln, Nebraska, so it was an hour-drive for me. So I went in. It was an accelerated course. I met with a number of cohorts that were doing it as well, some of them that I knew and some of them that I would become good friends with. We started our Master’s program. It was pretty early on that I identified that, “Gosh, I want to know: what were our chances? At what point should we have stopped? What should we have done differently?” I just wanted to know more and, if I ever had to do it again, refine how I’d do it.

As part of my thesis, Dr. Connor sent out an email blast to a number of archaeologists and said, “Hey, are you aware of any landfill searches?” And I sent written letters to state patrols, or highway patrols, depending on what their designation, as well as the state’s attorney’s office because I felt they would have helped at least prosecute or investigate or have knowledge of it within their states. And then all the large departments – Dallas, New York City – if they had a specific investigative unit, I sent a letter to them. All in all, I probably sent out 125, 100 to 125 letters.

My boss at the time, I had made chief 3 years before this (I had made chief in ‘99), and my city manager, I went to him and said, “Can I use official letterhead for my research?” And he said, “Absolutely. This is going to help law enforcement, whether it’s us or somebody else, yes, please do.” And I told him: I will pay postage out of my own pocket, but I felt it would be more official letterhead. I believe that was also some of the reason why some of the agencies did respond. It was of interest that the letter would go out and it went to one department and they’d say, “Oh you need to probably talk to this department because I know they had one, and it was a smaller agency but there was just no way I could send out that many letters. One in particular was a case in southwest Colorado. That was somebody else, probably Denver PD, that said, “We didn’t have one, but so and so did in the southwest corner. You might want to reach out to them.” And we reached out to them as well, any time we got that information.  

I should also say that my thesis was also a presentation at the international forensic archaeology conference in St. Louis, and I don’t recall the year. Probably had to have been 2008, I believe.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Because you gonna go look it up.

Brian Paulsen: Yup. Absolutely. Quite honestly, that’s where I met Kimberlee. And other components of that book, Forensic Archaeology book, where my research is published, there were a couple others that were there as well. And I believe one was from the UK. So some of those crime scenes, unusual crime scenes were presented that day. 

And one of my cohorts in the program, his thesis was on decomposition and different, not stages, different speeds of decomposition in controlled environments. Because we knew that the landfill was, as I said, 32 degrees, and when we were in there in July, and we also knew it was sealed from oxygen or a lot of oxygen. So he did his using pig cadavers to work on the decomp side of it. So he, we kind of worked hand in hand, and really kind of discovered some of the information from each other. Just off of those two, off of his and mine.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. Okay, so when you sent out these letters, were you just asking them if you could talk them, or were you sending them a survey? What was the level of engagement you were looking for?

Brian Paulsen: I was hoping that they would reach back out. Obviously all of my contact information. It was a survey form of letter: basically I’m doing research and this was institution, this was the agency I work for, but my educational institution was Nebraska Wesleyan, and did you have a landfill, were you aware of any landfills nearby you or in your state, and would you provide me with that information, or contact information? And then several of them, I would follow-up and try to get a hold of the detective within that agency. I kept track of who I sent the letters to and would reach out to a number of those and say, “Okay, this has been reported that you have a landfill search” otherwise what about this. And then there was obviously that great time saver, I just Googled “landfill searches” in the United States. I actually came up with a couple that I had to send additional letters out to because I discovered them on the internet but hadn’t sent a letter to them.      

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right. So, I didn’t have it highlighted in your chapter about how many responses did you get? I know it was a pretty low number.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, it was. And a lot of that I think had to do with, quite honestly, with nobody, I mean there’s such a timeframe that could have occurred. And I think it also showed, when I looked at it, you saw more landfill searches occurring as I started to do my research than prior, before. Before – 5 years before, so – there weren’t that many landfill searches. Because I had dated them all, built a timetable that I didn’t even put into my thesis. There were definitely an increase of landfill searches starting, or had occurred and starting to occur. So we were one of those accelerating there in Nebraska.       

Yvonne Kjorlien: Very interesting. Okay, so I have here, “The results are gathered from 46 searches provided from reliable sources.” And then, “An additional five searches not used in the results for evidentiary purposes and not in the recovery of human remains.”

Brian Paulsen: Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Out of 100-125 requests –

Brian Paulsen: About a 30% return.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You know what? 30% ain’t bad.

Brian Paulsen: No, it’s not. I thought it would be more. I thought we’d have more landfill searches up to that point. And I’m guessing it was underreported or underdiscovered…

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah.

Brian Paulsen: …because there was really no way to reach out. In hindsight, I probably should have sent to the fraternal organizations, your national associations of chiefs of police,  or the police officers’ associations of each state, and as well as the sheriff’s side as well. And then went from there. Mostly it’s, drug investigator conferences – okay, let’s go to those conferences. We talked about going to the international associations of the chiefs of police and having a booth there. And we didn’t, based solely on cost. But we tried to reach out to everybody and anybody we could.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Let’s talk about your results. So you did mention before that that 30-day mark when it comes to the search, that’s kind of the tipping point.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup. And then we started to look at the recoveries in the research and in the responses I got back, and we started looking. I think there was only one recovery out of all of those that occurred 30 days after the event. It’s very important obviously in the York, Nebraska case of a six-hour recovery. It’s very important from time of death, or time of discovery, to the time you enter the landfill, that also affected it as well. The shorter amount of time from death to entering the landfill, the higher the probability of recovery. And then obviously that recovery you could push it, but in 30 days, it was distinctly against the search at that point. At Day 30, the likelihood of recovery is very, very low. 

Yvonne Kjorlien: That’s very interesting, especially considering you know the detailed records that waste management keep.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup.

Yvonne Kjorlien: You wouldn’t think that the time of search would be so fixed and so short because you would know that kind of know where the remains were that you were looking for.

Brian Paulsen: Yup, you’re absolutely right. It’s a direct contrast. Because if you, with all the information that landfills store, that you’d be able to go right in and to that point. And my search, the search that I led, was a good example. We knew where we were going but we hit that 30-day window, 29- day window, I think it was, and we chose not to go any further. There’s a lot of background, and I don’t want to say interference, but there’s a lot of background movement politically, okay. Because in my case,  the media was there everyday. I gave a media report when I left the landfill everyday. So, people were saying, well there were a lot of people, there were the people who were saying I hope we never stop,  and then there were the people saying get him out of there, get those people out of there, let’s go on operating normally.

It affected the landfill. I mean, obviously they’re moving trash they wouldn’t have. It changes their record keeping because the trash coming in during July was being taken to a different spot.  So it changes their record keeping. It’s like, okay, this isn’t on June 30th the trash is here, but all the January trash is over into a different phase of the landfill. And, honestly, as well as the operation, when we went into the landfill, everyday they used a measure of dirt, anywhere from 12 inches to 18 inches of dirt to seal the trash. While we were in there, they changed operations and they were spraying it with a coating that was sealing the trash, not having used the dirt, allowing to put more trash to be put into an area. When they put that trash, all that trash that was either the overburden or what we searched, they pushed back in and they, at the end of that day, when they were pushing it back in, they sealed it with this, I called it an ectoskeleton, and I believe, and I know I did in my thesis, I wrote much like a dipped ice cream cone: you put it in, you pull it out and it hardens. It saved them a tremendous amount. They actually had a hole left over when they put all the trash back into the hole that we had dug out because they weren’t putting a foot, 18 inches of dirt on top of each day. They were just basically sealing it with a much thinner layer.

So there’s a lot of pressure. That’s some of what I’ve been researching or reading on the searches for the Indigenous women in Canada is the pressure, and who’s going to pay for it. We were fortunate. We – not saying it’s right – we had a young boy who was murdered and put in a dumpster and I think there was a stronger desire to recover youth or children in a heinous crime like this, over just the average citizen. And I don’t know that that’s fair and I have nothing to support that but my experience has been that an adult victim of crime is not looked on as deeply as  a child. So, I think the pursuit of a child in a landfill that’s no-hands-barred, we’re going in, we’re going to take whatever we can to recover. But those outside mechanisms, that outside work, is a lot of pressure on the folks that are operating the landfill as well as the people that are searching.

Most of my agency was at the landfill. We required them, so we had to cover the streets. There were a couple of our officers who had young children who said, “I don’t want to be in there. I don’t want to be the one that finds that.” Okay, then that kind of designates you, your on the streets. The rest of us will go to the landfill. And that worked out well.                         

Yvonne Kjorlien: So I just want to go back to the results of study. It says here, “Of the 46 cases, searches were successful in 20 of the cases reported.” So that’s under 50%.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, that’s pretty disappointing. And then, “In 25 searches where the duration of the search is known, 13 lasted seven days or less.” And, “if the timeframe is extended to 30 days, an additional seven searches were added”, so up to 20 then.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, yeah, I think it’s important to know that is not going to be successful. You really have to accept that right at the beginning, that there’s a distinct possibility that searching a landfill, you will not be successful for what you’re looking for.

Brian Paulsen: Right. Absolutely. You’re correct. And I don’t know – there was nobody at the time that we started on our search, there was nobody that gave me or that had that information. I think we still would have went in. Again, going back to the information we had, all the solid information we got from the landfill, all the information that they record, I still probably have went in. I would have felt more pressure, I believe I would have felt more pressure as we went in, starting getting into the late teen-days, as well as that third week, the 21st day, saying “gosh, we got nine days,” we might have pushed harder. We might have had an injury,  we might have had something negative come out of that whole search. But, again, that information wasn’t there, wasn’t readily available to us at that time.      

Yvonne Kjorlien: You could have had another level of mental health because anxiety finish or to find something.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, yup. I totally agree. Going in, even into the middle of the search or the halfway point, I still thought we were going to be successful. I think everybody out there was feeling that same way. And when I say “out there”, those that were in the landfill. We took one day – again, it was going back to the regional media interest – we took one day, the prosecutor’s office took one day, one afternoon and we’d like to bring the media in, but we don’t want them to have access to the general population. So, let’s stop the landfill at lunch, we’ll feed them, they can go on their way, and then we’ll have the media come in. They got in, they were able to get their video footage, they were able to ask some of the law enforcement questions about how long, what’s it like, you know, those types of things. But we didn’t subject the general population to that. But it really eased the pressure. There were still daily briefings at the gate at the end of each day. We took an afternoon to make sure they have the information they wanted.           

We initially had helicopters flying over and getting video footage and such while we were searching. We had another individual – we laugh about it, I smile about it now  – but he was a reporter for the Omaha World Herald. Every morning, he knew what time we went into the landfill. We’d gather, we’d start migrating out on those trailers at about 8 o’clock, and for those that went in early, drove our own vehicles back into the landfill, we saw him get dropped off on the road and walk down the fence everyday to the same spot. And he’d sit there all day and watched us. And I’m sure – I know because he took pictures that I eventually got a couple of with a telephoto lens. He was over there taking pictures, he was the only one that had really thought about “hey, where can I be if something happens?” Everyday, he was out there. Diligently, he was sitting there. He knew that we would quit at 330 or 4 o’clock, when we reached a point of quitting, and you would see him kind of march out and a car would pick him up. And we always used to talk about the old cartoons where the sheepdogs and the wolves were checking in and greeting each other at the time clock. And it was like, “Yup, there he is. He’s coming in, so we can get started.”

We tried to make light of the situation. It was a serious time of all of us, and just trying to make light of that situation.               

Yvonne Kjorlien: When I was working on the Pickton investigation, we were warned right at the very beginning – because there was quite a number of us that were employed as civilian technicians, and we were all anthropologists and archaeologists, and so we were not law enforcement – but we were warned at beginning that we would be approached by media, and to not comment and to direct them to commanding officer. And I was approached a couple of times. And I found it very disconcerting. Because they wouldn’t, there would be no preamble. “Hey, I’m so-and-so journalist / reporter / whatever. I’d like to talk to you.” No, it was right out:   “Hey, did you find anything?” “How much are you getting paid?” It was very abrupt, in your face, and disruptive. And I was wondering if your volunteers had any experiences like that.

Brian Paulsen: None of that was reported back to us. We really tried diligently to protect them. But generally, obviously with our general public, we, at the beginning of this case, we had no idea where the boy was. It was January so we had freezing temperatures at night, at day, we were seeing 30s and 40s. So we were doing this land – I call it the ground search – for basically about 9 or 10 days. Mostly law enforcement. We had people on horseback, the sheriff’s posse, they came out. We had other agencies that were sending people out. We actually didn’t put a restriction on anybody. We had a younger news reporter who said, well, I can’t get any information, so I’m going to volunteer. She actually volunteered, she went out with a group, but she was asking them questions, but at that time, again it was only first responders, and they knew they couldn’t really discuss the case. She did do the human side: Why are you doing this? And a lot of them were saying: we’re law enforcement, or we’re fire, rescue, whatever they were, we just believe that, hey, somebody calls and needs help, and we’re first responder in this line of work, and we’re going to respond and going to help where we can. But she was out there. And she searched just as much anybody else. Because I, at the end of the first day, I asked the group that she was with, “Is she a bother? Is she being a burden to you?” And they assured me she wasn’t. Had she been, I would have asked her not to come back. She searched for two days, maybe three days, and then after that, didn’t search any more. And she may have been the last three days of the ground search. When we called that off, saying we have no where to look.

That was January. April, after his outburst, we all met, the sheriff’s office and the state patrol, FBI, all the four core agencies – five, I guess with the crime scene unit – we just kind of went through the case again and we ended up searching a sandpit. Because we thought that was the only open water that was open in January. So we searched that sandpit. Found nothing of significance. And there was a lot of experimenting, I shouldn’t say ‘a lot’. There was some experimenting going on. Early on in the search, in the ground search, we had two units of cadaver dogs that responded, one out of Story County, Iowa and one out of Kansas City area. One of them, one of the cadaver dogs from the Kansas City area was actually in the landfill with us and she spent a significant amount of time, towards the end she had to go back to work, but her and her dog were in the landfill. She was using it to develop her own research. She was obviously placing cadaver material in the landfill and seeing if her dog could locate it. We watched her. And the dog alerted. We also watched the dog  – he was in there, they were both in there – we had some illegal dumped material, came from the hospital. – let me step back, it didn’t come from the hospital. It came from the family.  They had a family member who was injured,  needed medical attention, went to the Emergency department, which was probably six miles from the landfill. He was treated and then all of his clothes, all of his belongings were thrown into a sack at the hospital. The family didn’t want to do anything with it because it had been cut off of him. So they basically just threw it into the landfill. So, we had medical waste that came from the family, the dog alerted.  

You talk about that anxiety, that sense of hope when that dog alerted and he’d found cadaver and it wasn’t planted or placed by his handler, it was like “Oh my gosh, here we are. We have finally, we are finally culminating, we gonna be successful.” Hopes are up. And then, so we slowed down the operation. At that point, the folks up top knew something was going on because there was no more trash coming up. We decided at that point, we told them something happens down below, your work up here will slow and eventually will stop because we’re not sending anything up. And they knew something was going on because no more trash was leaving. And we were hand searching, using the excavator as much as we could, and finally discovered this bag of clothing that had human blood in it. And it’s like, gosh! Well, it solidified that the dog could do it, could work in that environment. But, again, no help to our case.                                         

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, very disappointing, very disappointing. So I’m conscious of the time. So what have learned between doing this landfill search a few years ago and then doing your research? What are some lessons moving forward? Because you did mention to me before that you found out there’s no database or no database that collects information on landfill searches.

Brian Paulsen: No. Probably, I’ve found nobody that probably has more knowledge than the National Centre for Exploited and Missing Children here in the United States. They have a resource there that consults with a lot of the landfills. Other than that, I’m not sure there’s even anybody tracking landfills at this point. I think there’s more knowledge about it, and obviously with the internet and the explosion of the internet and the availability of information. Google searches are producing more. I was receiving, obviously my business card went out at several of the events as well as at that archaeology conference in St. Louis, and those folks that took those they were sending me information, news clippings. I was able to get a few more gathered from there. One, of really no value to my research, the perpetrator wanted the body to be found and wanted it to be of shock-value, he actually put the body in a recliner on top of a landfill over on the east coast. Stuff like that kind of jades the research so it sits off in a separate pile basically because it’s not of value to us.

But just gathering that information, keeping track, watching what’s going on. I have to admit I wasn’t looking outside the United States. So when the media in Canada started talking about the Indigenous females that were in the landfill, or in the landfills yeah, two separate ones, I gave them my opinion. I said if you can get there in 30 days – I didn’t know that Canada does the data gathering like the United States, which if foolish of me because they do – and they said they have a good idea of where they would start. You know there’s a lot of contrast. And, again, I’m talking there a young boy, four years old, there was a lot of interest, a lot of community drive: let’s go get this kid, let’s make sure we get this boy recovered, this is the right thing to do. So, again, it was very low expense. We had our major contracts, those excavators were coming from our major contractors, the dump trucks were coming from contractors. You know, we were using a little city dump truck and it was moving probably half of what those big trucks from the contractors were moving. But he was still there, he was still doing it, you know, and every little bit helped. We had contractors that were coming in, the private contractors was a one-man operation, he spent a couple-three days with us using his excavator. All donated. Food, there was no cost. The water, no cost. We had folks in the area who wanted to do something and would come u, and they knew that we came back for lunch, so they would come to the gate carrying boxes of cookies and cupcakes and things like that. All donated. The equipment was all donated, the gloves, everything.

The Sarpy county attorney’s office had one individual Curtis, who just was phenomenal, in gathering all this stuff. I think he told me there was one business who said, “no, we can’t do anything,” but every other business that he approached over that 30-day window said absolutely we will. He was also a part of that major debrief where we had the banquet. The Governor of Nebraska came in and recognized the department for our work. A number of citizens had written letters had actually quite honestly to the President. We had a letter from the President, as well as his photograph, saying “good job.” Things like that. So people were appreciative, in the community, and in the region, really. And they did whatever they could. We tried to get a thank you out to anybody and everybody. The Dairy Queens in July are busy, but they’d send up 50-60 Buster Bars.

Those were the types of things that they were driving out and giving those . So you think that you’re not doing anything, as far as for the community, for the region, but you’re under notice. You don’t think about that. I wasn’t thinking about that when I was searching. It was after the fact that I was like, “Oh, that was a little more significant that I thought.”

As far as the research and/or the information you talked about, it would be nice if there was a database. We electronically keep records. I can tell you, in the system that I use now, there is a location of, or there is a category of locations, and you can put landfill search in there. So it would be much easier to store. But the compliance, or the voluntary compliance of, gosh, is everybody collecting that information? As a small agency, this was a town of 7000 that I was the chief of, and we weren’t really interested in anything other than if anything was happening in our parks, in our schools, within our community. I doubt that we would have recorded that as a landfill search. We would have said the murder happened here, the landfill search was supplement to that. It was a significant enough event that a lot of people still remember. Obviously I remember it. Just a little more detail in the records-keeping. That can easily be stored in agencies and at the state level as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And sometimes it takes a little bit of hindsight and distance before you can see the linkage that actually we should record that because that all linked to whatever and that helped us down the road. Yeah, so sometimes it’s not apparent at the time but definitely becomes clearer the more distance you get from it.

Brian Paulsen: Yeah, and my research was probably five years after the landfill search. And it was fresh in my mind, obviously, even at that point. But it wouldn’t even be that hard to go back and correct something. And say, “this was the landfill search”. You know, regionally, and definitely within that community, there are people that are probably in their 20s that would remember that well in until their 60s and 70s. And when we were talking about our volunteers and talking to the general public, we limited it to, we originally said, 18 and above. And then we had a first responder come from a neighbouring agency and she had a son who was 17 and her daughter was 16. And she said, “hey, would you mind if they come out?” We said, “only if they’re with you, they can come out.” So she brought her son and daughter and they searched as well. But they were the youngest two out there. They ranged, I guarantee you, they ranged into the 60s and 70s that were out there searching as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I found that too that. The older people, to the retirees – there the ones that have the time, that are able to come out and search not just the hours, but days and sometimes weeks to an effort.

Brian Paulsen: Mmm. Yup. Yeah, absolutely. One of our everyday guys was one of those elderly guys. I can still tell you right now, he had a straw hat and wore a white long-sleeved shirt every day. And his name was Tom, his first name was Tom. When we started looking and counting, and we said who’s Tom? He’s was there every day and we thought he must be the guy with the hat, he’s here every day. And, sure enough, when he showed up at the banquet, we said, “are you Tom?” and he said, “yeah, my name’s Tom.” And we said, “well, we were wondering. We kinda figured that’s who you were and that was your name, and you were there every day.” And he goes, “Well, I don’t want any more acknowledgement than that. You telling me that at this point is all that I need, that you recognized I was there everyday.” And I said, “that’s perfect.” He eventually – a number of businesses at that debrief, a number of businesses donated something. We had a weekend in Kansas City, we had a weekend, several weekends in Des Moines, a weekend in Omaha, that were gifted — we just started drawing names of everybody who was there and I hope everybody got something, I don’t know that that is a fact, but I do know that Tom did get something and he was very appreciative of that. It was just a small token for the amount of time and effort that he gave us.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Would it be fair to say that your landfill search, the success of it — and I’m not saying, success because it went well, even though the remains were not found, but that the search itself went well — that that success can be directly attributed to community support?

Brian Paulsen: Oh absolutely. There is no doubt that success. Obviously discouraged for the first few days, week afterwards. It’s like, “gosh, what else could I have done different, we have done different?”  But, boy, looking back on that, and you talk about the number of people. Now, 300 showed up for the banquet but there were probably 5 or 600 people that were there when you started looking at every roster signed in and the duplications. So only about 50% showed up. But to bring 600 people into the landfill and search at various time and dates, various weather conditions – we had rain a couple of times, the heat was pretty overbearing a couple of days – but to have that many people, absolutely it was a success. And it wouldn’t have been a success without the support of that community. There was community involvement much larger than I originally thought. I thought our community of 7000 is bearing the brunt of this, but looking back, the region really was supportive for this entire event. If we’d have said in January, “hey, we need this,” they’d have come as much as they did in July when we were in the landfill.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Do you know what, Brian? You asked. You and your department asked for help. So it all starts with the ask and then the community can jump in and deliver. So it takes two, right?

Brian Paulsen: No, absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s that work. We used the media everyday. When we decided in the back of the landfill away from the media, we decided that we were gonna open it up to the general public — we weren’t getting through enough trash – we went to the media and our media report that day was: we need help, we’re going to up it up to the public, this is what you do. And they asked their questions, because they’re gonna do a story and that night – I didn’t see every news, but I know two stations that covered it – and said they need help. They’re asking for help.

And, I’ll be honest, I thought, “We might double our force, we might go from 20 to 40 people.” And then when you have a 109 people roll in the next day, we just kept shaking our head “what are we doing? How are we going to do this?” We really exploded the operation from there. We didn’t have the, we were taking them out in vehicles. And then we got the trailers. And then we decided lunch. Our Salvation Army was there every day, they cooked us breakfast. Excuse me, not the breakfast, they cooked the lunch. The food was brought in and they would cook it or keep it warm and they would hand it out. They were walking around, talking to us, just kinda of support. It was just wonderful to have the Salvation Army there.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Wow. Amazing. Brian, thank you very much for talking to me.

Brian Paulsen: Absolutely!

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you for your work on that search. Thank you for your research on landfill searches. I hope that we get more people doing research so we can potentially develop a database, share it with others, and grow the information and get it out there, so that if they have to do a landfill search, they’re not put in the same situation you were that very first time.

Brian Paulsen: Yup. And you know I’m interested in sharing that information. If anybody calls me, I’m use gonna, I use it. To be totally honest, you’ve got about 30 days, you’ve got 30 days. At 31 your chances really diminish. And I tell them, this is my research. And we talked about, everybody, the majority of people now understand how to do a search, like modeled after 9-11, but it’s that carrying on and what you need. You know, I never thought about the tetanus shots. I never thought about, gosh, we need to have them wash their hands because they’re dealing with trash, even though they have gloves on. Just those little things. That whole list of things is out there now because that’s how we did it.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Nice. All right, Brian. Thank you very much.

Brian Paulsen: You bet! My pleasure.