Recently, A local SAR team rescued a hiker that was abandoned by her group and it bothers me, a lot. I’ve been ruminating on this for several years.

About 25 years a go a friend of mine was climbing at the smoke bluffs in Squamish, setting up a top top rope. Near him, someone was preparing to be lowered but had rigged it wrong – he’d placed the rope over the webbing without a carabiner – an accident as described in the link below.

My friend pointed out the error, but the other climber replied with a “fuck you” and continued to be lowered. My friend reached over and managed to clip a single draw between his anchor and the rope – just before it cut through the anchor webbing. Thus saving his life.

My point here is this: there is one thing we can rely on in this life more than anything else, and that’s human fallibility. SAR people know this intimately. People make mistakes. They don’t deserve to die because of those mistakes. “These things we do, so that others may live”

But here’s my message: We’re all in this TOGETHER. In recognition that people are fallible, that nobody knows everything, and that we all approach the backcountry with varying degrees of competence and experience, we owe each other assistance.

SAR volunteers are looked upon as heroes, but any one of you can be a hero at any time by looking out for your friends, and every other backcountry user on the trails.

You’re a community of users. Mentor each other!

You know those liability waivers that people make you sign? The ones that say you take all responsibility for your own safety? Those are lies. Those are legal documents. The truth is that you’re all responsible for each other – because anyone can make a mistake.

And when I say shared, I don’t just mean hikers. The ski hills, the tour operators, the gondola developers, the heli-ski guides – we ALL share this responsibility. Regardless of what the legal waivers say, we owe each other our best effort – to educate and prevent accidents.

This attitude that it’s all “personal responsibility” is all fine and good, but doesn’t account for human fallibility. If you’re organizing a trip, you’re the leader. Regardless of what the waiver says, you are the person who created the conditions for this trip to happen.

Likewise, if you build a trail, a gondola, or a backcountry hut – you created the conditions for people to use that resource. You owe those users your very best effort to educate them about the risks, conditions, and skills required, regardless of the legal fine print. And finally: stop blaming the victims. Nobody starts the day with the intent to cause an accident. Most SAR tasks are the result of a lack of knowledge.

We need a new backcountry manifesto. When you venture out away from the safety of civilization, you need to obey the unwritten rule: stop, and help each other. This needs to be taught in every backcountry safety course, and written on the back of every legal document.

As a SAR volunteer I find these discussions frustrating; first because there’s very little evidence that selfies are a significant contributor to the number of accidents we respond to, and second we shouldn’t be concerning ourselves with the reasons people spend in the backcountry, just their safety.

All speculation aside, people like to hike, and like to spend time in BC’s backcountry. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry here. They like to take pictures. This is very natural. The only thing that’s changed is some people post those photos online and can make a living doing so. The more people who do so, the more likely there is to be an accident.

The “concern” about selfies appears to be a judgement on the motivation of the people we rescue, and a variation on the blame the victim mentality that often rears its head after a high profile rescue — where “high profile” usually means within about 20 km of downtown Vancouver.

The fact is that people have been climbing and taking pictures of their exploits for as long as cameras have existed. The reasons people climb mountains are varied and complicated, ranging from personal growth, the concept of “conquering” an obstacle, and more recently for sponsored athletes and instagrammers – as a job.

The mountain doesn’t care if you climbed it for “the right reasons”, and neither should anyone else.

From a Search and Rescue perspective none of these reasons for climbing a mountain makes a damn bit of difference when you’re rolling someone into a body bag and flying them off a mountain in a cargo net. The mountain doesn’t care if you climbed it for “the right reasons”, and neither should anyone else.

The thing to remember is that all recreational reasons to climb a mountain are just that – non essential. You could stay home and avoid all of the risk. Every kayakyer, rock climber, hiker, canoeist, hang glider etc, is deciding to take a risk for their own selfish reasons and there’s nothing wrong with that.

There is nothing wrong with taking a photo. As I’ve written previously, selfies can be a part of your trip plan and an important safety link. Selfies, in and of themselves, may motivate people to visit certain locations but the beauty of those locations made them popular.

Our only motivation should be to make sure that people taking part in backcountry adventures, and yes that includes instagrammers posing for photos on the Joffre Log, are well informed about the hazards, prepared with the right equipment and training, and understand how to call for help when they need it.

Out missing person was described to be a female dog walker approximately 50 years old, with three dogs.

The early parts of a response are all investigation related. I call the police (in this case the Coquitlam RCMP), and they brief me on the situation. We usually get a general description including notable health issues, a last known location, and a few other items before we delve into the details. From the short description I knew almost immediately that this would require a full team call-out – not because I thought it was a particularly difficult task, but it because it was very cold out, the missing person had very little equipment, and the weather forecast indicated a massive storm was coming in.

Now just a step back for a moment – while I said above I knew this was an urgent task and would require a full team call out, at the same time I was almost certain that the RCMP would find the missing person very quickly, possibly even before I arrived on scene. This might sound contradictory, but it gives you a lesson on how a SAR person thinks. Even though I thought it was highly likely that this missing person would make it out on their own, I also knew that we needed to respond immediately in case they didn’t. SAR people are always thinking of the worst case scenario. This is a good thing, because that’s exactly what happened.

The area where the person was reported missing is cris-crossed by many trails and roads, and is as busy as you’d expect next to one of the largest urban areas in Canada. It’s very popular with dog walkers, hikers, mountain bikers and off road vehicles. From experience I knew that most of the trails are within earshot of each other. I knew that it would be easy for someone to get lost without a flashlight, but it should also be easy to find them with enough people.

The Profile

One of the first things we do on every search is bring up a map. The next thing we do is usually open up a cope of Robert Koester’s “Lost Person Behavior”, find the missing person profile, and draw the range rings on the map.

Now that last sentence might sound like a whole lot of jargon – because it is. The Koester’s research took thousands of SAR tasks, and split them into certain profiles like Hiker, Hunter, Gatherer, Mountain Climber, etc. Then, by taking the distance between where the person was last seen (Last Known Position or LKP) and where they were found, he built a statistical profile of how far from the last known position they are likely to be found.

This results in a set of ranges, or range rings. Statisticians usually work in quartiles, or a quarter of the popuation. So we have the first ring at a given distance from the LKP labelled with 25% – meaning a quarter of the missing people matching this profile were found within that distance of where they went missing. Then we have a 50% ring, followed by a 75% ring.

The last ring is 95% because in this statistical districutio there’s always a few people who are found really far away, sometimes thousands of kilometers. This 5% tail is left off the distribution, and is also a reminder to SAR personnel that it’s always possible for someone to be found in the “rest of the world”.

Along with the statistical model of the missing person, Koester also supplied a written profile of the lost person behaviour category – including some insight into the basic motivations of people in that profile, their general behaviour, what equipment and goals they are likely to have, and other insights. Bob also provides some investigative questions to ask, and a list of “reflex tasking” that gives a SAR manager some immediate information they can act on.

This profile is very useful for people who many not understand the particular sport or recreation that the missing person is doing, and even for those who do it’s a good reminder of the state of mind and particular quirks thos people may have.

An example is the gatherer. This profile covers people looking for food such as berries and other wild food, and includes mushroom pickers. Part of that profile indicates that the person will come back to a particular area again and again, but may not tell anyone where they are going especially if the item they are gathering is of economic value. They’re often afraid that someone else may discover and steal “their” crop.

However, there is no profile for dog walkers.

Our team has rescued a lot of dogs and dog walkers over the years, so we’ve become quite familiar with how they think. I’m even more familiar than most because I’ve had dogs for quite a few years now, and one of my very early posts on this blog is about me getting lost while walking my dog near Squamish. I’ve experienced exactly how someone gets lost, and I know the habits of dog walkers from my own social circle.

So we used the Hiker profile, and I put together a short briefing of what we could expect from a dog walker like our missing person had been described.

In the month and half since the search I’ve been working on a more complete dog walker profile including a behavioural analysis, investigative questions and initial taskings like Koester does in Lost Person Behavior. I’m attaching a link to that document at the end of this post.

The End of Day 1

The events of the rest of this search have given me enough fodder to cover blog posts for the next decade, but I’ll just summarize the rest of day 1 here.

By about midnight on Monday night I realized that this search was not going to resolve quickly like 99% of the other searches we respond to and that this was a one in 5 year event. Basically, we had enough of our members out, and enough time to cover all of the major trails on Eagle Mountain and also had begun to cover areas between the trails.

Our level of coverage made me confident that a conscious, mobile person would have been found by a combination of our searchers and the RCMP dog team that had been searching the area.

What was left to be covered was a gravel pit to the north east of the last known position, and a wedge of land extending into the Coquitlam Watershed that had no known trails, and consisted of second growth. I suspected that she would be located in the Coquitlam Watershed.

Around midnight we began planning for our second operational period, and activating our mutual aid resources – which essentially consist of the other SAR teams in our area. I lined up a SAR manager to take over the next day, and put together a set of tasks for him to set into motion for the next day.

Conclusion

As most people know, the missing dog walker was found around noon on Wednesday, on day three of the search. She was hypothermic, unable to walk, and required six days in the hospital to recover. It’s the largest search we’ve done in our area since 2012 when we managed a search for two developmentally disabled women near Sasamat Lake, and one we will be thinking about for a long time to come.

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Blogging

In 2017 I did almost no blogging – I published 10 blog posts including this one.

I drafted another 4 posts and never published. This is one of the things most people don’t recognize about writing; that a lot of your output really isn’t fit for human consumption.

Speaking of things not fit for human consumption, I did spend a lot of time posting on Twitter and Facebook this year. In some way these short, pithy posts made up for the lack of blogging in some way, but I suspect that they had less impact. Most of the posts on Facebook are about what SAR teams are doing in BC, and most of the post on Twitter are more opinionated. I passed 1000 “followers” on Twitter this year. What this means to me is that there’s a greater chance for some kind of engaging conversation on a per-tweet basis which makes it more rewarding. My feeling is that respectful conversation is possible on social media and I do learn a lot that I would not normally.

Remember when Twitter was called “micro-blogging”?

On the blog, How to Kill Yourself Snowshoeing is still the most read post I’ve ever written with over 10k hits this year. There were 32k hits on the blog this year. The opportunity and time for the amount of effort to craft and publish a blog post just didn’t present itself as often this year. If you’re interested in the post I’m most proud of you can click here.

SAR

Other major events this year – my SAR team responded to more tasks that ever before in our history. From time to time we make a big deal about this but I want to say that my opinion is that maintaining readiness and responding to any number of tasks makes you a good person and more tasks doesn’t make you a better person. Certainly one of the problems for smaller SAR teams is the stress from being ready and having few tasks. Up to a point, call volume is a good thing if it increases slowly and your team can handle it.

This was also the first full year of service for the new SAR command truck I helped design, and I could not have been more trilled to be at the helm for so many searches in this new facility. It was amazing seeing the designed we collaborated on, imagined and drew on paper become reality – and work better than expected. Particularly gratifying is the technology component that I designed and installed myself.

It turns out that I “tied” for managing the most tasks this year among our 8 SAR managers – but I also managed quite a few “stand down” tasks where the person was found quite quickly. July was particularly busy. Finally, near the end of the year I was the SAR Manager who handled the first operational period of what was to become the biggest task of the year – the search for a missing Coquitlam Dog Walker. At some point I’m going to write some thoughts on that.

Health

This year is also the year I took a step back from field deployments. As many of you know, I have Polycystic Kidney Disease which is a genetic condition that results in my kidneys slowly growing in size and declining in function. In March of this year the GFR (Glomerular filtration rate ) was 20 – which places me at Chronic Kidney Disease Stage 4 (severe). On advice from my Nephrologist I registered with the transplant clinic and spend much of the summer undergoing pre-transplant clearance testing. I’ll need a transplant in the next few years. I’ll write more about this another time.

The main symptom I experience is fatigue. I have the kidneys of a 90 year old man. I handle my day to day very well, but in the evenings I’m exhausted. I notified the SAR team that I could no longer take part in field work unless it was vehicle based, and that I’d let them know if I was too impaired to take on a task. This means that the long line rescue I did in Golden Ears Park in 2016 is likely my last one. I’ll still be involved in SAR, but just in a different way. There are many ways to contribute!

Trauma

This year we had a very stressful interlude when my 6 year old son suffered a depressed open skull fracture while we were on a trip to Mexico.

What started as a 3 day trip to attend a friend’s wedding turned into a 12 day ordeal when my son hit his head on a marble table in the lobby of the resort while we were checking out. What looked like a simple cut on his temple turned out to be a depressed fracture of the skull. He underwent surgery that night and spend the next three days in hospital, and the next few days healing.

Cancun is a very beautiful place. Mexican medical care is top notch if you are a rich foreigner and can pay for a private hospital. Dealing with insurance over the phone when your son has a brain injury is the most stressful thing you will ever have to do. NEVER take for granted socialized medicine and the innumerable benefits of knowing you’ll get quick, urgent and professional care for free and not have to worry about being bankrupted from it.

Eamon is fine and shows absolutely no signs of any short or long term effects from this injury other than a wicked scar.

Software

On the software side, my main project, TrueNorth Geospatial, is working well in the beta release. Several SAR teams are using in now, including Coquitlam SAR. We’ve got a beta release of the radio tracking piece working which we’ve been using all year. Work continues on this and if you’re interested in taking a look feel free to download a time-limited demo copy.

I also have several clients who I do work for. One of them, ThinkSensor Research, makes a synthetic aperture sonar and I’ve been writing the “Topside” software for this system. We spent part of the summer with the sonar in my back yard pool and sitting at a picnic table hacking on hardware, firmware, and communications protocols. It’s a pretty exciting project, and it’s possible we’ll be going to Tuktoyaktuk in the spring to use the sonar on the ice.

My other main client is Echoflex Solutions in Squamish who make intelligent energy solutions – wireless lighting and heating controls. It’s a form of “Internet of Things” based around the Enocean protocol and it’s also a really exciting area to be working in.

Of course there’s a few other projects – including YourLo.ca/tion and others. I’ll see if I can post updates on these when I can.

Summary

Blogging here for the past eight years has been very rewarding.

I like writing about my ideas, and taking the time to structure them in this way so others can read them.

One of the unexpected side effects of putting ideas out into the public domain is the feedback you get, and the opportunities to connect with other people all over the world and learn from them. To all of you who’ve take the time to read and especially to those who’ve taken the time to argue, comment, email and otherwise engage, thank you.

Hope 2017 was bearable and best wishes for 2018!

For this article I’ll refer to these as “SEND devices” to not use product names when the category will do. Note that Personal Locator Beacons are different from SEND in a number of ways. You can read more about that here, and more about my personal experience with a PLB response here.

User Error

The first down side of the SEND devices is the following use case. Someone goes for a hike or an extended trip and tells their friends and family that they will check in every day (via the “I’m OK or other mechanism). For some reason, they fail to check in on one or more occasions. SAR is called, and responds, only to find that the person is not in distress.

My SAR team has responded to two instances of the above scenario (details in link) and I’ve collected at least three other reports within British Columbia from other SAR teams. It is distressingly common!

Malfunction

The second issue we’ve discovered is that it is possible for any SEND device to be triggered in error!

In July of this year (2017), in the middle of one of the busiest months my team has ever encountered (as I’ve previous mentioned), we got an activation from a SPOT device relayed to us. It wasn’t an “SOS” – which would have gone through different channels, it was a “Help” message which had been sent to a family member, who called 911.

Since it was just a generic “Help” and there were no details, our plan was to send a team by helicopter to investigate. The location attached to the message placed the sender in the upper Pitt River Valley. The family member indicated the male was fishing with two friends. The helicopter proceeded to the location, landed and one of our SAR members approached the part. They were surprised that they were the objects of the search, and claimed that they had not triggered their devices.

Following up with the family later we concluded that it was a loose cover on the “Help” button of the SPOT device. In the photos below you can see that the Help button cover is not secured. When placed in a pack its possible the button can be triggered. Note that the SOS button doesn’t have this issue.

As you can see, the device in question is a SPOT Gen 3 which is the latest generation of the SPOT series (as of this writing).

Discussion

Many comments on Reddit and other locations reference the fact that the design has changed over the years, and some of the claims are that, for certain models or manufacturers, it is “impossible” to trigger the device in error. Our observation is that with enough use any design can fail, and that the conditions inside a pack with other gear will always offer an opportunity for damage or accidental triggering.

Unless you’re actively tracking your location you SEND device should be turned off. If you are tracking your location (using one of the “breadcrumbs” type features on SEND devices) then the device should be strapped outside the pack with a clear view of the sky for the best signal strength. Low signal strength drains the batteries of these devices faster by repeated attempts to re-send messages.

When the device is stored in your pack it is best stored in a waterproof, hard case. Examples include “Pelican” style dry cases.

Conclusion

As we rely more on our technology, we need to treat it with a certain degree of respect. Once your technology becomes your lifeline, it becomes essential to protect it from damage and preserve the battery life. Each device has its own operational modes with strengths and limitations. If you’re going to start using it, you need to understand these. I hope by publishing this experience users can become more informed about these issues.

In fact, back in 2014 I published a Social Media Action Plan for SAR to highlight how gathering information on the social media profiles of missing people is now considered an essential part of a SAR task – equal to the missing person information forms.

A recent search by my team illustrates this quite well.

The Task

Three hikers were reported missing by a friend of the family. No names or ages were given, which was very odd, and only some very general information on their location. So general, in fact, that we were faced with a very large search using a lot of resources to cover three different trailheads.

We were also told that although all three had smart phones, none of them had any power left as they had been texting and calling family members.

The team began to muster, and I was given the task of gathering information about the subjects.

A few phone calls later I had the basic details and was filling in a missing person’s report. I ended up talking to a friend of one of the hikers and as part of the investigation I asked about their social media accounts. That’s when the Snapchat information came up.

Snapchat

One of the main features of Snapchat, an instant messaging mobile application, is that pictures and messages are only available for a short time before being automatically deleted. Based on this profile it would seem that this social media network is the exact opposite of something that could be useful for SAR, but ironically it wasn’t.

There’s a “Stories” feature for Snapchat where you can post a series of photos that are available for 12-24 hours. On my phone call to the friend of the missing hikers I learned that one of them had been posting these stories, and the friend managed to capture the screens and send them to me.

The first photo of the series clearly showed the trailhead signs with the trail name, which narrowed down the location by a lot. Other photos in the series showed that the trio had made it to the summit of the ridge and had likely gotten lost on the way down. Photos were tagged with geographic information and one contained an elevation. This placed them on a well known trail in our area.

Images above used with permission.

Resolution & Analysis

After relaying the information to the team, the SAR managers put a fairly large team on the trail in question, and found the three hikers soon after. Being prudent, teams were still sent up nearby trails in case the hikers had come down a different way.

The information we gathered via social media did not make the difference between life and death in this case. The hikers were in good condition and had managed to avoid getting off trail and into the steep hazardous terrain nearby. This is not always the case when we respond to this area, and some pretty serious incidents have happened here.

The subjects did not tell anyone where they were going. This is very common with younger hikers who are used to being connected via social media with their friends – most of the time someone knows where they are because they’re always sharing that information. That habit breaks down as soon as you leave the pavement.

The other major component of this task was that none of the three had any phone battery life left when we responded. We were unable to call them.

Luckily there was cell service at the trailhead and elsewhere on the route.

Advice to SAR Members

Always investigate. Call parents, and for younger people, call friends. Ask about social media activity. Don’t be afraid to dig. Even systems (like Snapchat) designed to hide information can be used to gain locations.

Advice to Hikers

• leave a trip plan! Tell someone where you’re going!
  • This speeds up a response.
• If you do nothing else, then take a #TrailHeadSelfie
  • At least we’ll know the trail you’re on.
• Do not use your phone while on the hike
  • save the phone in case you need to call for help
  • do not call or text your friends, call 911 and then wait for a call from SAR

You may recall that last year there seemed to be a precipitous increase in SAR calls and I speculated on what the cause might be. The readers of this blog had a vigorous discussion over the past year on what might be driving this increase – ranging from simple population growth to social media, or smart phones. also came to the conclusion that whatever is driving this increase, it’s not population increase.

Compared to population

This year I’m not going to focus on the number of tasks because as many people have pointed out, when you draw charts that focus on the raw numbers you’re usually just charting population growth (more people, more hikers, more people calling for help). So this year I’m only going to present a chart showing number of tasks per 100,000 people.

The population statistics come from the provincial government. I’ve used the quarterly population estimates to plot the tasks per 100k people.

What we’d expect to see in the chart if the number of tasks were driven purely by population is an approximately horizontal line, or a line with a slope of zero. We can see two periods in the chart above with that characteristic – 1998 to 2001, and 2002 to 2009. A regression line over either of those periods would lead me to believe that tasks were being driven by population growth over that period.

However, from 2010 to the present, we’ve seen a 50% increase in number of tasks per 100k people. Since 2015 we’ve seen a 25% increase in tasks per 100k which is alarming.

Regional Breakdown

Another quick chart we can show is the percentage of the total tasks in each region of BC. This is interesting because many people, including SAR members, media and the public, are under the mistaken impression that most of the SAR tasks in BC happen in the southwestern BC which has approximately 60% of the population. As we can see from the chart below, the reality is that the southwest only accounts for an average of 36% of the total incidents.

If anything, SAR groups in the other regions of BC are doing more tasks per capita than those in the southwest.

Also of note is a slightly downward trend in the percentage for the southwest.

Another way to look at the proportions

For reference, the map below shows the regions.

The Data

In an effort to get more people involved in thinking about these trends, and encourage people to try their own analysis, I’ve embedded my working spreadsheet below. Feel free to make a copy and try your own co-relations.

A link to the spreadsheet is here.

The problem with tropes is when they are over used or stereotypical. For instance there was a recent article about how “bad guys” in Hollywood movies always tend to have some physical abnormality or other culturally perceived aberrant behaviour – in this example, bad skin. We know in real life there’s no correlation between bad behaviour and looks.

An excellent investigation into tropes and storytelling, and the sometimes awful way they are used is the amazing series by Feminist Frequency called “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games”. Another resource is the web site TV Tropes.

I find that tropes are especially problematic in storytelling when that story is about an actual event and it’s being told in the media. Reporters, for many reasons, tend to describe events in terms of these tropes, either because they’ve been exposed to too much bad TV, or because they need to make the story more interesting. The problem is that those tropes tend to obscure the possibility of people actually learning anything about the event.

With much apologies to my professional media colleagues I’d like to offer the following list of SAR Media Tropes with concrete examples on how they harm the conversation about backcountry safety. I’d like to encourage readers to contribute their own, and I’ll list them here.

Tropes

SAR Members Risking Their lives

If we are doing our jobs right, and following all of the safety guidelines, we are not risking our lives. Search and Rescue involves a certain element of risk, but to depict SAR volunteers as taking inordinate risks is wrong and goes against the very safety message we’re trying to portray. It also feeds the blame the victim mentality that rears its head in the comments section of every article.

Additionally, depicting us as risk takers tends to recruit the wrong kind of people to apply for SAR positions. We don’t need those people.

Foolish Hikers

This trope is particularly troublesome. We rescue a lot of people, and by definition they do not have the resources to get themselves out of whatever situation they are in. However, the media likes to place the subjects into one of two categories – either a very experienced hiker who was just unlucky, or a foolish hiker who did something stupid.

The reality is much more complex. Everyone we rescue to some extent got into a situation that overwhelmed either their capabilities, skills, or equipment in some way that made them require external assistance. There is a broad spectrum of what is considered “prepared” and it depends on season, location, and conditions. Most of the people we rescue are only guilty of being badly informed.

To serve the cause of backcountry safety I encourage reporters to get to the heart of what the root cause of an incident is without treating the subjects, or their imagined bad behaviour as part of the story. This puts the focus on the events and how to avoid them.

Out of Bounds Skiers

The issue of out of bounds skiers comes up every year in the Lower Mainland, mostly because we have three ski hills inside the Metro Vancouver area. Anything that happens on these mountains is over reported, becomes a story, and takes on a much larger profile than the size of the problem deserves. Out of bounds skiers make up a vanishingly small number of the rescues that happen every year in BC, and even in the Metro Vancouver area are a minor component of SAR.

Secondly, painting “out of bounds” as somehow illegal or wrong leaves the impression that all backcountry skiers are somehow doing something illegal. This could not be further from the facts.

The actual safety message gets lost in this trope and is very frustrating to all of us involved in SAR.

You’ll often find this trope combined with SAR Members Risking Their Lives and the next trope.

Charging for Rescue

This pernicious trope comes up all the time when a high profile search comes along. Usually the media aren’t the ones to bring it up, but often they “report” on the ill informed public sentiment that gets stirred up when they use the Foolish Hikers, Out of Bounds Skiers, and online comments predictably bring up that the victims should be charged for their perceived “crime” of requiring rescue.

Even the hint that someone might be charged for rescue must be avoided at all costs. All SAR organizations, including the British Columbia Search and Rescue Association which represents all of the SAR teams in BC, are unequivocally against charging for rescue.

Charging for Search and Rescue makes my job harder, endangers my SAR colleagues, and makes SAR outcomes more perilous for the subjects as well. Any media reporting on a story about SAR should avoid any hint that this is an option – allegations of charging for rescue should immediately be met with a phrase such as ” of course it’s well known that Search and Rescue is free in Canada and SAR organizations are universally against any charge for their services.”

SAR Officials

I hate this trope. It’s lazy and it does nothing to give credit to the amazing volunteers who leave their lives behind to find someone.

Lazy media reporting often use the term “SAR Officials” or “SAR Technicians” to describe a Search and Rescue operation and general facts about the event. They do not credit the individual teams involved properly. It’s an important detail to include in a story about a rescue because it includes the human element – that these are volunteers from communities all over BC who take time out of their lives to do live saving work.

Building on this, and mentioned by my friend a former professional Canadian Forces Rescue Technician, media are also guilty of referring to all rescuers regardless of professional status, as “Rescue Techs”. This is lazy and does a disservice to both the public and the rescuers : the public needs to know who’s doing to the rescue so they can gauge the seriousness and the scope of the effort, the volunteers deserve to be recognized for their service in a volunteer position, and the professionals deserve to be referred to in a way that distinguishes them for their level of training and professional status.

Cost of Rescue

The cost of a rescue is often reported on and it is a natural question to ask when considering a large operation. The trope comes in when the cost is reported as a round number without any context. As mentioned by my SAR associate in the comments below, the cost of a single rescue can be stated, but how does this relate to the cost of the rescue system as a whole, and how would this be different if it were not run by volunteers? What would be the cost to society for not performing the rescue? How does the cost of the SAR system compare to other provincial budgets (and sources of income) such as tourism?

In general the media tends to report absolute values and not the proportions those represent in the larger scheme of a province lie British Columbia – and absolute values tend to sound “big” unless put in context. Thinking about how much a single event costs can also lead people to the “Charge for Rescue” trope.

The BC media tends to over report on events that happen in the Lower Mainland – and Metro Vancouver in particular, so many members of the public are well aware that over the past few months three people in two parties have gone missing on the North Shore.

In addition, most will recall Shin Noh who went missing in Coquitlam, and of course Tyler Wright who was the subject of a 16 day long search in 2010.

But does anyone know about Jafar Imenpour? How about Brian Faughnan?

My point is that there’s quite a list of missing people that SAR has searched for and been unable to find. There’s no central repository for this information. I believe that it’s a worthy task to bring all of these cases together and highlight them from time to time.

To than end I am requesting the Search and Rescue community to contribute your cold cases to this list. What I am looking for is just the basic information for now – names, dates, basic details. We can fill in a more detailed profile for each as time allows.

The request

• I’m looking for cold cases with SAR involvement, not general missing persons.
• I’m currently only looking for cases from British Columbia
• No, there is no central list of these cases.
• No, neither EMBC nor BCSARA maintain such a list.
• In fact EMBC “not found” only means not found by search and rescue so looking through old data doesn’t tell us what the outcome was.
• Goal of the project is to bring attention to cold cases that might slip under the radar. For example if someone is hiking in an area and finds a clue it would give them a place to start
• I’m looking for basic information, not task sheets and GPS tracks (at this time).

Embedded below is the initial list of missing person I’ve been able to compile from my memory and a few other SAR members contributing information. Feel free to email me any that are not on the list.

PLEASE NOTE

To the members of the public or family of the missing in this list; Missing Persons are the responsibility if the RCMP of local police force of jurisdiction. SAR groups search for missing people to the best of their abilities but when all avenues are exhausted, we recommend to the RCMP that the search be called off. Sometimes this is because the chances of finding someone alive has become impossibly remote, and the hazard to the searchers outweighs the chances of a successful outcome.

I’d like to highlight that SAR groups are not responsible for the ongoing investigation, and this list doesn’t represent any activity on the part of any SAR group in BC – it’s just me, a SAR member, attempting to help in my spare time.

The patient was transported to emergency care where a CT scan showed a depressed skull fracture with bone fragments protruding into the brain. A complication was air introduced into the cranium, which ruled out transportation by air. The options presented were immediate surgery or wait to see if the air resolved in a few days. Surgery was chosen because of the obvious severity of the injury and possibility of infection. This had either been missed or was not visible (possibly deep in the wound) by two physicians prior to surgery.

Surgery was successful although the surgeon reported that the dura mater was torn and could not be sewn. A synthetic material was used to patch this, and gelfoam was used to control further bleeding. The bone was set back into place. The patient showed no obvious neurological deficits.

Learnings for SAR

The subject in this case was my six year old son and I am presenting it here for SAR volunteers to learn a little about depressed skull fractures.

I’ve seen a few head wounds in my years as a camp counsellor and at first I was unconcerned. There is always a lot of blood from a head wound and sometimes it looks much worse than it is. I felt that a few stitches were all it would take to close it up and all would be well.

My first question to my son was whether he had lost consciousness – and he said he had definitely not. He reported that he’d tripped, fell, and hit his head on a marble table in the hotel lobby. I realized later that I did not take the time to interview witnesses as to the mechanism of injury. I was frankly shocked to see the CT scan and the extent of the damage.

The seriousness of the injury was made even more apparent after the surgery when the surgeon reported that there was hair in the wound which almost certainly would have resulted in infection. The torn dura mater could have introduced this foreign matter deep into his brain.

Everything about this case was made much more complicated by virtue of the fact that the accident happened in Mexico and there is a significant language barrier. This necessitated decisions being made regarding hospitals, emergency treatment, hours on the phone with the insurance companies, and so forth. Throughout the process the medical care was excellent, careful, compassionate and skilled as far as I could tell. However, despite their best efforts I believe my partner and I only understood about 75% of what was told to us because of the language barrier.

I found myself scanning in the surgeon’s report, and running it through Google Translate to make sure I had understood what was happening. I ripped the CD of the medical imaging and sent them back to BC for friends to pass on to their neurosurgeon associates for a second opinion.

The air in the wound was surprising both before and after surgery. Pre-surgery the air was two very tiny bubbles visible in a different CT slice than the one presented. Post surgery the air seemed to be extensive but in discussion with medical colleagues back home it was suggested that the gel foam may look like air on the CT Scan.

I should report that at the time of this writing we are 5 days post operation and he is doing very well, and still shows no signs that I can detect of any problems. We’ve had a third CT scan and we’re cleared to fly home two days from now.

Lessons

• First responder training is not always adequate to diagnose a depressed skull fracture.
• Loss of consciousness is not definitive in this diagnosis.
• Even a minor head wound can have hair embedded in it. This is not field treatable, but is something to keep in mind.
• Best to always suspect a fracture and transport rapidly to definitive care even without loss of consciousness.
• Any skull fracture may introduce air into the wound. In the context of BC Search and Rescue it’s unlikely we will ever fly at an altitude high enough for this to cause an issue, but it does need to be taken into consideration when arranging air transport.

I’d like to thank all of my friends and colleagues for their support over these past eight days since the accident. Social media worked very well to ask for ideas and support from experts in my network all over the world. Despite feeling alone we knew there was a lot of people who cared about us, and it made a difference.