One Simple Rule To Survive

Amber Donnelly from Southeast Alberta Search and Rescue (SEASAR) shares insights into their volunteer efforts, training, and how the community can support search and rescue operations. Learn about their response strategies, training standards, and ways to stay safe in the wilderness.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Southeast Alberta Search and Rescue
01:24 History and Volunteer Nature of the Organization
02:30 Fundraising and Community Events
03:04 What Inspired Amber to Join SEASAR
03:36 Roles and Responsibilities of a SAR Volunteer
04:33 How to Volunteer and Training Requirements
06:07 SAR Alberta and Standardized Training
07:06 SAR Location and Facility in Medicine Hat
07:50 Fitness and Skills Needed for Volunteers
08:35 Territorial Coverage and Terrain Challenges
09:35 Responding to River and Cliff Incidents
10:32 Involvement in High-Profile Search Cases
11:27 Post-Search Analysis and Lessons Learned
12:22 Prevention and Trip Planning Tips
13:47 Hug a Tree Campaign and Staying Safe
15:27 Collaboration with Other SAR Teams
16:41 Community Support and Donations
17:47 Time Commitment for Volunteers
18:58 How to Get Involved with SEASAR
19:22 Final Thoughts and Community Outreach

Getting lost can feel overwhelming, the simplest advice can be the most profound. Amber Donnelly from Southeast Alberta Search and Rescue shares critical insights on what to do when you find yourself in a tricky situation in the wild.

The First Rule: Stay Put
"If you get lost, just stop, hug a tree. If you stay in one place, we have a good chance of finding you," Amber emphasizes. This straightforward guidance is a reminder that panic can lead to poor decisions. When faced with uncertainty, grounding yourself can make all the difference.

Southeast Alberta Search and Rescue, founded in 1999, operates entirely on volunteer efforts. Amber notes, "We are a hundred percent volunteer, ran, operated, everything. There's no paid staff." Their annual fundraiser, the Medicine Hat Massacre Adventure Race, not only supports their operations but also serves as a training ground for members.

For those interested in joining the team, Amber explains the process: "Check out our Facebook page... if they're interested, they can go to www.SEASAR.net and there's a contact us form on there." The journey starts with a criminal record check, followed by in-house training in essential skills like incident command systems and rescue operations.

Amber reassures potential volunteers that fitness levels vary: "There are roles available for any different age level, fitness level, depending on what someone's interest is." Everyone is trained as a ground searcher, which is crucial for effective operations during emergencies.

The work of Southeast Alberta Search and Rescue is a testament to community spirit and preparedness. If you feel called to help, consider reaching out to become part of this incredible team.

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Transcript

0:00

Hey, this is Brian again, and I'd like to ask you to do a favor. We can't do this work without people like you. So if you can, please like, share, subscribe, tell your friends about bring back the porch. You. You get lost. It's in our nature to try to, I'm going to say self rescue or find a way out. And if you're completely turned around out there, you might just be pushing yourself further into a wooded area or something. So we like to say, just stop. Hug a tree. If you stay in one place, we have a good chance of finding you as long as you're safe in that one place. But yeah. Stop. Hug a tree. Stay put. Otherwise, if we're moving one way and you're moving out, pass it. There's no like. We got to keep trying to get to you. So just hug a tree. Stay where you are. Stay This episode of bring back the porch. Brought to you by medicine at Monumental Crafting Quality Memorials of Distinction since 1970. Look who found her way to the studio today. Sometimes we can find our way somewhere. I would hope that being a representative of the Southeast Alberta Search and Rescue, that finding your way here was easy. It was? Yeah. Really? Besides having to go up the stairs to your little studio out here, it's very easy to find your guys's place. Amber Donnelly is our guest on this episode of Bring Back the Porch to talk about the Southeast Alberta Search and Rescue. Welcome. Thank you. How long have they been doing this now? So, CSI, our Southeastern British Search and Rescue was founded in 1999, 1999. Okay, so we're on 26, 27 years here going strong. Yeah. And it's a volunteer based organization. Yes. We are a 100% volunteer, ran, operated everything. There's no staff members, paid staff, none of that stuff. So you live off the fat of the land? Yeah, yeah. And that land can get a little thin sometimes. Fundraising. Do you do that? Yeah. So every spring, actually, I believe it's on Mother's Day weekend in May. Every year we do the. Adventure race out in Elk water. Oh the massacre. Yes. The Medicine Hat massacre adventure race that brings different adventure racers from across the province. I know that I believe I've spoken to some that were from the Grand Prairie area or even further north. I think we've had some even come up from the States a few times, but that is our main fundraiser for the the year. It's also used as a really big training opportunity for our members, because we're putting in our skills to help set it up, maintain the safety of the race, all that sort of stuff. Yeah. And then we do a little bit of other stuff. 5050. We raffled off a hot air balloon ride a couple of years ago for the Rise Up festival. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Willie helped us organize that and get that going. So that was a nice little fundraiser for us. Another friend to bring back the porch? Yes. So what drew you to want to be involved with Search and Rescue? My dad was actually a career firefighter for. Oh, shucks I don't even know, like, 30 years. He was a volunteer with Cypress County Fire. Since my memory ever can figure out. And he was a firefighter out at CFB Southfield as well. So just being part of that first responder family has always been part of us. Yeah. And how long have you been involved? I've been involved for about four and a half, almost five years now. Okay. Now you're the secretary. So what does that entail? So that's one of my hats. Yeah. That entails keeping sort of our online tracking system that we use. We use a program called D4, which is for emergency management. It's keeping track of all of our membership paperwork, minutes, organizations, everything that you can think of that as secretary on the board is responsible for. Okay. That's one of my hats. And. And the other. You said one of your hats. I'm also part of the recruitment team. So being out there talking to people, handling the recruitment emails that come through when people are like, hey, I'm interested. How do I go about this? And I am part of the public relations. So managing the social media, getting out there, doing things like this, this is the easy part. I think, I hope. Well, I think you're doing most of the work. I'm just answering the question so. Okay. Recruitment. If I want a volunteer, what's the steps and what do I need to do? So right now we encourage people to check out our Facebook page. We're being pretty good at putting out there what we're doing and giving people an idea of what the volunteer role actually consists of. And then if they're interested, they can go to like and there's a contact us form on there. Type up a little note saying, hey, I'm interested in joining. What do I need? It'll come over to the recruitment team's email address and we'll look at it and reply. And basic steps going forward would be we'd need a criminal record check with vulnerable sectors just because of the work that we do do. Then most of the other stuff we kind of train in-house from getting a person with their set up for their ICS 100, which is an incident command systems, which for anyone in emergency services, they should be pretty familiar with it. It just keeps gives you the structure. We also do different in-house training. SAR Alberta has put out a curriculum for across the province so that we're all being trained to the same basic standard level so that we can join together with other teams and have been trained to that same standard and be able to integrate much more easily. And then from there, there's different things that you have the opportunity to train for your UTV operator, boat operator, swiftwater rescue technician. Ropes. Rescue technician. Drones. Most of it we can train in-house. Some of it. We will bring in a training facilitator to come in and teach the team. So. Okay, you mentioned SAR What is that stand for? Search and rescue. Search and rescue. Yes. Okay. Is that a umbrella for all of the problems or so? Oh, okay. So, yes, our Alberta Search and Rescue Alberta has kind of come in at this one umbrella for. I'm not sure any better wording at this time, but they come in and they've sat there and helped bring all the teams across Alberta to a certain standard so that we're all operating the same, training the same. Then when it comes to bigger searches or disaster response, such as the wildfires across Alberta, they can take any team from across Alberta. And I believe there's about 33 different search and rescue teams within Alberta alone and place us wherever they need us to be, and be confident that we can work together and put out that standard that they expect us to have. That makes the team work better. Yes it does. Yeah. Do you physically have an address or a location that you work out of in Medicine Hat? Yeah. So right now I think it was this spring. Potentially time blends in so fast. We actually moved out and shared the Box rings fire station location just outside of Redcliff there, which was a huge step we've spent, I think the last 25, 26 years out of the Medicine Hat airport maintenance hangar, which was fantastic for us, but we've grown and we needed a little bit of space. This allows us to have our trucks and trailers inside, especially in the winter, plugged in, which then we don't have to load out so much stuff and it helps us respond faster. Yeah. Now, for someone who's thinking about becoming a volunteer, what about fitness? Do they have to have a certain level of fitness? It definitely helps, but you don't have to have a certain level of fitness. There is a little bit of an expectation of being able to, you know, carry your own pack. We have to be out there with our packs that should be set up for 72 hours, self-sufficient. But there are roles available for any different age level fitness level depending on what someone's interest is. But everybody on the team is trained first and foremost to be a ground searcher, because at the end of the day, if we only have five people, showing up takes a lot longer. Yeah. And we're going to need you probably boots on the ground. Yeah, yeah. How big of a territory are you responsible for? It says southeast Alberta. Yeah. So. Trying to think of the easiest way to sum it up, I would probably say from here to the Saskatchewan border, across the Montana border, almost all the way to Taber, and even as far as Jenner, anywhere that, like Cypress County fire kind of covers. And then we cover into 40 mile, we cover into Newell. Yeah, it's a lot of real estate. It's a lot of real estate. And the terrain contains changed drastically in that area. Anywhere from, you know, the flat prairies working within the city setting Cypress Hills, if you go out towards more like towards the Badlands and Dinosaur Park, you got the hoodoos and the cliffs and it definitely switches up on you in a second. Yeah, the rescue part I'm just envisioning. Perhaps somebody steps off an escarpment looking out over the South Saskatchewan River. Would that be something you would respond to, or would you leave that to emergency services in Cyprus County or Medicine Hat? That really all depends on the tasking agency and and what they are making that call on. Obviously, if we're talking about stepping over the serpent around the Saskatchewan River, you do have to set fire department out there with their boat and stuff, which they're, you know, 24 over seven in house. We do have the shallow bottom jet boat or shallow water jet boat so we can get to like, riverbanks and everything quite easily. We do have the ropes rescue team, so we can go and assist in that. We have trained with Cypress County Fire for Ropes rescue quite often, so we can be called out to that if that's what the tasking agency decides they want to do. You were telling me before we went on the show here that you were southeast Alberta Search and Rescue was involved for the search of the nine year old boy in Calgary recently. That had to be hard on the heart. Yeah, that one is a hard one. We did have members that were up there, some working within the command post, some as ground searchers, door knocking, that kind of stuff, or Justine, resource coordinating or being prepared to go if it extended into another operational period. Yeah, those ones are hard ones. It's always hard when it's a child especially. Yeah, but sometimes you just have to take a little solace in the fact that eventually he was found and the the family, the community, everyone can begin to grieve in whatever that looks like for them. Yeah. Do you analyze the search after the fact to learn lessons so that you okay, if this situation happens again, we have well, remember what happened in this situation or that situation. You have a playbook. Yeah. So all of our search managers and the incident command team, all of that at the end of any search that we do, they will look back and go over everything before we even dismiss our own team from a search. We usually do a little bit of a roundtable and say, what went good one with bad? What do you have to add on to this? And all that goes back to the team later on, and the incident management team will review things and see, you know, what we did well, what we can improve on. Everything is a learning opportunity, and every search can give us an opportunity to either like hone in our skills or find an area where maybe we can look at bringing in a new set of skills, or how we would do this differently. Obviously, every search call that comes in is slightly different. Every situation is unique. Do you do prevention? Do you help people not get lost? Yeah, that's one of the things we love to do. Tanya, who is supposed to be here with me, is really good with that. She was trained in different things for that. But we do do a little bit of prevention. One of the things we really have been promoting this year is leaving a trip plan. And that's just, you know, I'm no different than anyone else. I like to just pack up, go away. I've traveled to Ireland myself, stressed my mom out a little bit with that. But, you know, leaving a trip plan like, okay, this is what time I'm expected to get there. This is the vehicle I'm in. I'm expected to be home at this time. I know even last winter I did a solo hike up in Canada and I said, okay, I'm taking this trailhead. I should get here about this time. If I have signal, I'll text you to say, hey, I'm at this trailhead. I'm going to begin my my hike. Google maps or all trail says it should be about this long, so give me this much time afterwards. If you don't hear from me at such and such time. Yeah, okay. Maybe send a. Yeah. Blow the whistle. Yeah. Make the call. Yeah. But yeah, that's just one of the things, like leaving a trip plan. It can be as simple as we're in this vehicle, we're parking in this parking lot. It. If for some reason you don't return or contact your person by that time, it gives who's ever responding, whether it be ourselves, the police fire, it gives everyone a starting point. Yeah. When I was looking through your website, one of the tabs that caught my eye was hug a tree. Oh, yes, hug a tree. It's a really simple concept. You. You get lost. It's in our nature to try to, I'm going to say self rescue or find a way out. And if you're completely turned around out there, you might just be pushing yourself further into a wooded area or something. So we like to say, just stop. Hug a tree. If you stay in one place, we have a good chance of finding you as long as you're safe in that one place. But yeah. Stop. Hug a tree. Stay put. Otherwise, if we're moving one way and you're moving out, pass it. There's no like. We got to keep trying to get to you. So just hug a tree. Stay where you are. Stay safe. Now, when you're going through a search area, you might be calling the name of the person who is missing. And they should answer. Sometimes they don't. Yeah. There's there's different things we will call. We'll try to call their names. Depending on the area. They might whistle occasionally and just do other sound things to alert your attention. That can be that can also come across as really intimidating for a kid that things are going to be in trouble. So we try to do it in a fun way and watching our tone when we do it, for sure. Yeah. So the psychology involved too. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of stuff involved with it. There's a whole there's someone that's interested in psychology, the whole lost person behaviors that they kind of go off of. Okay. Now, are you affiliated with other groups in search and rescue in southern and the southern part of the province? Do you sort of enter train, that type of thing? So we're our own team, but under the Search and Rescue Alberta umbrella, for lack of better terms, we do have the opportunity to connect with other teams. For instance, Search and Rescue Alberta hosts an all teams conference, and that brings a couple of members from every team across Alberta together to learn the whole. They will provide us with different seminars and learning opportunities over A23 day course. And we do our our big mock search out towards Patricia, and we invite other teams across over to to come out and experience the terrain that we have here, because a lot of them, when we first started doing this, think, oh, how hard can it be to, you know, search out in flat land? Yeah. And till we take them out there out towards Steveville you know where the Red Bull Enduro race is hosted? We kind of go out into that same area of land and, you know. Yeah, sure. It's flat down by the river, but then you have the steep and bank bins, the cliffs, all that. It it's very interesting when some of the other ones, other teams come down and see that. Oh, oh you, you really do have some cliffs here. Okay. Yeah. How can the community support you? There's lots of ways that we can just. General knowledge and support and understanding that we exist is huge. We are 100% volunteer, not for profit. So fundraising, donations, grant writing. That is what keeps us going. And that gets harder and harder every year. We have some amazing organizations here that are all probably having that same fight, trying to find out where, where they're going to get funds on, to move on with every year. So if the people are able to, we aren't, you know, not for profit charitable organization. We have all the numbers for all that. Tanya, the treasurer there is more than happy to provide different places, people, businesses with that information. But we can also go on. I think we're registered with Just Giving. Okay. But yeah, if people would rather donate to us directly, we can definitely make that happen as well. How much time do I need to commit if I want to be a volunteer and a member of a team? So that is a really kind of open ended question. Right now, the minimum level of the minimum level that we need is to after your basic training, of course, which is about two weekends committed in order to up keep those skills, we ask them to either do two searches or two mock searches or combination of or four training exercises that ensures that we keep you at that basic skills level. Obviously, we encourage our team to come out to more. We encourage them to come out to the PR side and learn more about search and rescue and help promote us to the community, get our faces out there and, you know, educate, which is just as important as some other physical tasks and skills. So it really depends. After you hit that bare minimum, then yeah, that's about it. Okay. Someone who is watching or listening to our conversation and they're thinking, that's something that might appeal to me. How do they get Ahold of you? Yeah. So if they go on www.seasar.net and you hit the contact us tab, they can write that little brief message like, hey, I'm interested. Can I know more information? And someone from the recruitment team will get back to them probably within 48 hours. We'll say, okay, and SEASAR is S_E_A_S_A_R correct? Yes. Southeast Alberta search and rescue. Yeah, yeah. Anything else you wanted to touch on, Amber? Oh, I don't know. Okay. Yeah, I think we've hit all the high points. I think so. I mean, I just encourage the community to check us out, learn a little bit about who we are, what we do, even just community support of saying, hey, yeah, we got this team here. They're great. Or they do this. That helps us out just as much as anything else. And we want people to know who we are so that if we ever have to respond to an incident that may involve them, that they're not afraid of us. Just like the firefighters, the police, the paramedics, all those guys, we're one of the good guys, too. We're out there too. Hopefully, you know, bring somebody home, help a family through one of their worst days. And yeah, we're here to make sure your days a little bit better. If you're if you find yourself a little bit lost. Amber Donnelly, Secretary, Southeast Alberta Search and Rescue. Thank you for the visit. Thank you for having us on.