Search and rescue volunteers from the length of Vancouver Island converged on the Horne Lake area Sunday as they took part in the second annual Rescue on the Rock event.
The training exercise, said Arrowsmith Search and Rescue spokesperson Gordon Yelland, was designed to help searchers from the different groups practice working together as a unified whole.
The searchers worked on several scenarios, all at Horne Lake park, he said.
“In the morning we did a scenario where a civilian reported he had heard some shouting up the road by the river not far from the campsite,” Yelland said. “We responded with a search team, who found two people stranded in the water and a third person on shore who was quite distraught.”
The ASAR team called in their rope and water rescue teams to resolve the crisis.
“The rope team put the water team into position to retrieve the two stuck out in the water,” Yelland said.
Another scenario involved a child in an inner tube (a dummy in this case) which was rescued by the water rescue team.
“That took us to lunch time and then we transitioned to a scenario that involved three quadders, one with a passenger,” Yelland said. “The four subjects had gone out night before, had been drinking, so they were disoriented. We sent vehicle teams out and spaced them along one of the main logging roads and we had Civilian Air Search And Rescue (CASARA) out of Qualicum Beach.
Howard Coram, the search manager with CASARA, said three aircraft were took part in the scenario, which involved one of the missing quads having an emergency locator beacon functioning.
“We had an emergency locator beacon set out and the aircraft will have to home in and seek it out,” Coram said. “Once they find it they will radio to the ground search crew the exact co-ordinates — latitude and longitude — of the search beacon and hopefully they will be able to locate it.”
Searching for beacons, he said, is much easier for aircraft than searching for hikers lost in thick bush.
“In the woods its much more difficult because you have a very small window to look down to the ground through the trees,” he said.
“The aircraft is flying at anywhere from 500 to 1,500 feet and moving at about 100 miles per hour, so the time you have to spot something on the ground is very limited.”
However, that’s not to say aircraft aren’t useful in a ground search of this nature — as long as the missing people have the wits to get into an open area and make some form of sign — stamping out an SOS in the snow or making one with tree branches.
The exercise, Yelland said, was a success on all fronts.
“It was a valuable exercise,” he said. “The big thing for us was communication and working with other teams that use slightly different protocols. We did a lot of radio relaying between teams to pass information back and forth.”
Besides Arrowsmith Search and Rescue, teams, participated from Campbell River, Comox, Metchosin, Saanich, Lake Cowichan, Nanaimo and Saturna Island.
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