The Clearfield County sheriff is expecting many of his nearly 500 posse members to search the woods near Curwensville tomorrow.

We have more on plans for the mock exercise.

The sheriff says the exercise is searching for a lost child who walked away from a picnic area.

“A straight-line search. People will be spaced approximately five feet apart. We’ll be looking for a small toy, maybe a teddy bear, maybe a piece of the little girl’s clothing,” says Sheriff Wesley Thurston.

Thurston says the child of two posse members, Jessica Smith, 7, will play the lost child and will be accompanied by a parent.

“The child will be found by the posse and then she’ll be brought out of the woods on horseback and she’ll be given a medical evaluation,” says Thurston.

He says one out of 9 searchers is a supervisor. His deputies, and retired police are in the group. People will have to sign waivers.

Melvin Orcutt already reserved Greenwood Club camp for a family reunion of 100 this weekend. He says the sheriff called to make sure the exercise was OK.

“I’m a little concerned, but there’s enough room for everybody, I believe,” says Orcutt.

He’s expecting the 10 a.m. exercise off Greenwood Road to wrap up by 2 p.m.

“We have a lot of people. We don’t have a whole lot of equipment. We don’t have a whole lot of training, but this gives people just a little bit of training and then people are going tobe encouraged to seek training on their own if they’d like to go to search and rescue trainings,” says Thurston.

In the event of a real search, Thurston says he split the county into five regions, and would call up one area through a computerized phone tree to get a manageable group of 50 to 75 people.

He would wait to use the posse until help is requested by a police agency. For example, during the flood in Clearfield, he says he didn’t know about it until the next day.

“Depending on where the incident occurred, that would determine which group of people I would call out,” says Thurston.

Thurston says and put in the instructions for Saturday that the posse is not authorized to use any guns, except in an extreme self-defense situation.

The instructions say participants should wear boots and protective clothing in case of rattlesnakes.