Volunteers hold search and rescue simulation at Fundy National Park

CBC

01-06-2025

Em Fabry was out at Fundy National Park on a rainy Saturday searching for a man in his 40s, having very few details about him.
She was participating in a mock search with more than 50 others from various ground search and rescue teams, joined by the members of the RCMP, Parks Canada, New Brunswick's emergency measures organization and some paramedic students.
Fabry had some training with Tri-County Ground Search, but she said this weekend gave her a chance to put her skills to the test.
"I've learned a lot of new skills and it's really neat to see all of that come to fruition today," Fabry said. "I'm trying to see how it plays out in a real search situation."
In the simulation, participants looked for a man after an incident between a husband and wife who went on a hike Saturday morning.
It's unclear exactly what happened between the two, but searchers were given a description of the man they were looking for.
Searchers were deployed in groups of four to five people with each group being assigned a task, she said.
"There's a little bit of an adrenaline rush," said Fabry.
Shawn Steele, team leader with Tri-County Ground Search and Rescue, said 30 people were on the ground searching and another 20-30 at a command post.
Volunteers had to exercise skills like clue awareness, tracking communication, searching, first aid and extrication.
"We try to make it as realistic as possible," he said.
There can be a few random events tossed in. A team member might be asked to fake an injury, which would force the searchers to respond.
Training officer Randy Breau, who was at the command post, said it is critical to have current information to be able to effectively deploy the ground teams.
He said he tried to make this weekend's exercise as real as possible. He had a person in the woods — the one reported missing by his wife — pretending to be the injured 48-year old man.
"They have mocked up an injury and they're actually really well hidden," Breau said.
Breau said the searchers may also find issues like the computers not working, not everyone having the correct information from the initial report, challenging weather, or some other unexpected ones.
"One of the key things is most people think that a lot of the searching is done by paid professionals when about 90 per cent of it or more is actually done by volunteers," he said.
"After all this we're going to debrief the members and then take a look at what was learned, what was done well, and then what we can improve on from what we did today."