Volunteer superheroes

Adam Laurie texted his wife that she wouldn’t be able to reach him.

For how long? He couldn’t say. But he would contact her when he was safe. Someone was lost north of Agassiz and authorities had called for the help of Laurie and his colleagues with the Chilliwack Search and Rescue team.

“It was a very memorable call,” he recalled recently. “It was one of those calls where you got to use all your technical skills that you’ve trained for.”

The weather was terrible and the search would last for days. But the group in danger was eventually located in the Chehalis River canyon.

The rescue would require the use of a helicopter and what Laurie called a “hover exit” out of the aircraft into the steep canyon. The extraction of the first person was simple. The second was not. That person had fallen into a steep gully.

“I had to climb up to get to where she was, and then wait there with her until we can get some more equipment flown all the way in… to extricate her out and raft her down a canyon and then put her in the helicopter.”

It wasn’t entirely a happy ending. A third rescue was for the recovery of a body.

Today, Joti writes about one of the province’s busiest and most skilled search and rescue teams and how its volunteers manage their mental health after traumatic moments.

Laurie recounts the Chehalis rescue in a book published last year that shares some of the most dangerous experiences of search and rescue teams from across North America.

The Chilliwack SAR team is one of the busiest in BC, after only the North Shore and Squamish-Whistler area teams, Laurie says. The Chilliwack crew, Laurie said, has always been known as a rescue team first and a search team second.

“A lot of other teams in the province do a lot more searches and everything else,” he told The Current. “Chilliwack has always done a lot of rescues.”

The team covers extremely demanding terrain that includes mountains, valleys, and rivers, all heavily used by thousands of recreation users.

Most SAR teams welcome new volunteers each year. (Some years, the Chilliwack program gets 100 applicants.) All members are required to successfully complete a basic ground search and rescue program.

Members are expected to log a set number of training hours to remain in good standing.

The positions aren’t paid. Like other emergency support services in the province, SAR teams are composed entirely of volunteers. Laurie says the model works.

“As soon as it’s a paid position, now there’s a lot more policy procedure, there’s a lot more strings attached to what you can and can’t do.”

And no one questions the willingness of volunteers to leave their family dinner or interrupt their weekend plans to respond to a call for help.

“Everybody has a sense of duty and a sense of service… So when there is a call that comes through, the majority of search and rescue volunteers will pretty much do what they can to drop what they’re doing to respond to calls.”

That’s just what Laurie did when he and his team set out on the Chehalis River canyon search. But those calls also take a toll.

“There’s times where it’s 12 hours later, where I’m just getting back,” Laurie said. “So it’s a mental toll on family [who are wondering], where are we, what’s happening, did something happen to us when we were out doing whatever we had to do.”

SAR teams have adapted over the years to better support members after traumatic or and emotional incidents, including those involving deaths.

“As much as we try in this world to compartmentalize our emotions on a call and you go from like, zero to 60, and then back down right away, there is going to be a time and a place where you have to deal with all of those emotions and that rush that came from it.”

Instead of immediately dismissing volunteers to their normal lives, teams will often now debrief after a call. The BC Search and Rescue Association offers peer support and resources to help members manage stress.

“I think we’re still very much in the infancy stage of [answering the question of] how do you really train people to understand resiliency? How do you train them to understand the things that they’re going to go through mentally, and then how to manage it, how to cope with it?”

What has grown, marginally, from the infancy stage is SAR funding. Laurie says the provincial government has started to budget for things like equipment and fuel. But a majority of teams still rely on fundraising. The Fraser Valley Regional District and the City of Chilliwack also provide financial assistance to the local SAR team, Laurie said.

As the weather warms and people venture outdoors the local SAR teams will be on standby. But you likely won’t see Laurie in Chilliwack. After serving 22 years with Chilliwack’s Search and Rescue Team, he now works as an assistant parks manager at Manning Park, where he continues to serve as a resource member for Princeton SAR.