Determined Valley rescue group gets by, gets people found

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

Dave Walsh of Waterville remembers general calls out from police for hunters, fishermen and woodsmen – “anyone familiar with the woods” – to help look for lost people. “You’d go out, spend six or eight hours in the woods and then you’d go home and that would be it. That’d be the official part, but some people concerned would keep looking and maybe make a find.”

He also remembers the day a little girl from Bentville, just down the road from his own home, disappeared: she drowned in the nearby Cornwallis River. “That really got us thinking we had to do more. We wanted training to be able to do searches.”

In 1970, volunteers started organizing a search and rescue team, and they were ready to go as an official response team in 1971. Over 35 years later, they’ve got a base at the Waterville airport, a converted school bus for a search HQ, specialized search equipment and a team of about 80 members – including three paramedics, 12 medical first responders, helicopter spotters, divers and an underwater search specialist, horse teams, trackers, evidence collectors, access to dog teams, generators and more. “People – and even officials – don’t realize our capabilities,” Walsh says.

That low level of awareness hurts Valley Search and Rescue when it comes to improvements: better training, better equipment and, search manager Fred Bond says, better results. “I had a fellow in the premier’s office the other day ask me what we did,” Bond says.

He points to 21 searches VSAR conducted officially through 2008; Walsh says evidence collectors are also called out by RCMP to help at scene searches, and those don’t go on the books because of the confidentiality of police investigations. Bond says of the 21, not one was a lost hunter: VSAR trains all hunters in woods skills. “We’ve had people reported missing that were deceased, people who’ve left school or home upset, seniors that wander, runaways from hospitals, suicides, where they’ve left a note and you know it’s not likely going to end well…,” Bond says.

Walsh says he has no idea how many searches he’s been on, but there are “lots I’d sooner have stayed home if I’d known how they were going to turn out.”

VSAR volunteers wear a pager or have a cellphone, and are on call 24 hours a day. “You’ve got to go but, at the same time, you don’t like what you’re doing,” Walsh says, describing being in cold water to his waist – or higher, trashing through woods, flies, the dark and rain. “Most of our work is unseen, in back country, in the night when everyone else is asleep,” Bond says, thinking that may be some of the reason why VSAR’s work isn’t as well-known. “But I can’t stay home while you’re child is lost: it would be my fault if she wasn’t found.”

VSAR runs all this on about $30,000 a year. They need to get their vehicles out of the weather, a building where they can offer better training and courses – even fundraising events. Top priority this year is the replacement of the old Argo, an amphibious off-road vehicle VSAR uses constantly to search between meadow and river, swamp and woods – and then either bring out a found individual, or take RCMP back to a more disappointing discovery. “There are situations the ordinary person would not want to be in, but there are times you enjoy it: you make a find, they’re OK and you bring ‘em out,” Walsh says. “You’re half frozen, hungry, but you won’t go back to the bus because, around the next corner, the person you’re looking for could be there. “That keeps you going.”

SAR show puts talent behind the team

Coldbrook Lions are making their hall and stage available Sunday afternoon, April 26 for Valley Search and Rescue.

Lion Roseanne Kaizer says the variety show in support of the emergency service will include entertainment from Ian Beaton, Country Grass, the Dearman Sisters, Colby Clarke, Matt Balsor, Matt Lunn & Friends and more.