After Thanksgiving, Tom Sharkey knew something had to be done to tame the crowds of off-roaders who descend on the Imperial County dunes every holiday weekend to play in California's giant sandbox.
Over four frantic days, Sharkey and his medical team responded to a stabbing, a fatal shooting, an attack on a ranger and dozens of crashes that left two dead and more than 200 injured.
"We're trained for an off-highway vehicle park, and we were doing things a major trauma center in a city would do," said Sharkey, assistant manager at the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area east of San Diego. "We weren't ready for that."
In response to last month's chaos, the federal Bureau of Land Management is treating the New Year's weekend at the dunes like a major forest fire. Authorities set up a 24-hour incident command center, turned a campground into a communications headquarters and brought in several agencies, including the California Highway Patrol and the U.S. Forest Service.
To carry out Operation Imperial Dunes, the bureau also tripled the number of law enforcement officers to nearly 100 and assigned them to patrol areas within the 150,000 acres of sand.
Their job is straightforward: protect both the public and the officers and look for troublemakers.
"The message they need is that they're not going to get away with this," said Hugh Dougher, a National Park Service ranger and one of two incident commanders for the weekend. "When they do something wrong, they're going to be thrown in jail. This is not the place they can come to escape the moors of society."
Many visitors applauded the increased law enforcement presence. The only critics were some of the younger crowd, who say they come here to escape the restraints of city life.
"I think they need to crack down. This is not the family atmosphere we are trying to instill. There is a bad group in any element," said Rick Wright, a member of the American Sand Assn. who has been coming to the dunes since 1966.
About 50,000 people had converged on the dunes by Sunday. Crowds reached nearly 200,000 during Thanksgiving weekend.
"Thanksgiving really caught everybody by surprise," said Jim Burns, a chief with the Imperial County Sheriff's Department. "Now we're out there with a large enough force to handle any problems that occur."
By Sunday evening, officers had arrested seven people, most on suspicion of drunk driving. More than 200 people had been cited for speeding, riding in the back of pickup trucks and failing to wear helmets or attach flags to their sand-mobiles.
