A veteran SAR volunteer's experiences in British Columbia
Regular blog posts
If anyone has been following the blog you will see the progression in the SAR curriculum; in the spring the courses involve navigation, then the rope rescue course kicks in. Then we do technical travel skills. At this point in …
I really shouldn’t complain, but 5 calls in 12 hours is quite a lot. Sunday night started with a late evening page for a lost person near Burnaby Lake. I did not respond to the call, but I did monitor …
SAR Day 44: For god’s sake, make the beeping stop!! Read more »
I’m used to the pager going off in the middle of the night, but believe it or not I have had “emergencies” in my other line of work (software engineering) as well. One such happened last Wednesday. In my day …
Some SAR Days are exciting, and some are not. On the weekend the team was paged out for several missing hikers; I did not attend the search, but from time differential between when the pager went off and the stand …
The other day I was climbing a well known 5.8 test piece in Squamish. I led, and Sylvia, who is 6 months pregnant, seconded it. About half way up she was heard to say “I think we’re at the inflection point; …
You may not know this but most of the internet is based on a series of standards known as an RFC. They started out as a way to kick off a discussion on how to solve a problem, but rapidly …
The following link has some text and a video clip from a recent rescue in the Fraser Valley. http://bc.rcmp.ca/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=50&languageId=1&contentId;=15653 As you can see they are performing what we call a hover stretcher load, which I wrote about today. Now I …
As noted in past posts, we do a lot of helicopter work. Sunday covered some advanced helicopter techniques, such as this: a hovering helicopter, and SAR member in the back seat, doors off. Team on the ground passes the stretcher …
I was unable to make this rescue. From what I gather, the team was called to rescue an injured subject on the Diez Vistas trail, around Vista 6. Members hover-exited at Vista 3 and hike to the site. The subject …
What follows is a first person account of a recent rescue on Eagle Ridge. At approximately 16:30 I get paged: “All members call task line for injured hiker at Buntzen Lake“. I dial in and hear the SAR manager describing …