Training, prevention top agenda at search and rescue conference

SARA MINOGUE

There were several frost-bitten faces among the crowd of nearly 40 people gathered in Iqaluit’s Frobisher Inn for a three-day search and rescue conference that started this past Tuesday.

Search and rescue leaders and volunteers from each of Nunavut’s communities met to talk about training, searching, and prevention. The goal of the event was to share information from different communities, with the aim of improving local search and rescue operations.

Participants were also to discuss what they need in the communities to conduct effective searches, and to prevent more searches from happening at all.

Alan McIntosh, Nunavut’s director of protection services, planned to present some of the ideas discussed at the conference to government, in order to improve protection services.

“We don’t set policy… I don’t set policy. But we can influence policy,” McIntosh said, as he ran through the agenda on Tuesday morning.

One highlight of the conference was scheduled for Wednesday, when Iqaluit search and rescue leaders Jimmy Akavak and Jimi Noble Jr. were to deliver a “frank discussion of what went wrong and what went right” during the five-day search and rescue in Iqaluit in May, which turned up only one of two missing men alive.

Three workshops were planned for the search and rescue volunteers.

The first, on Tuesday, was to look at organizing a search, and the processes involved. Nunavut’s director of protection services, Alan McIntosh, said he would offer some thoughts on “the principles of leadership” before this workshop began.

On Wednesday, participants planned to talk about training. In particular, what training people who aren’t familiar with the land should have.

“Unfortunately up here, we have a lot of people who go out on the land on weekends and think they have the survival skills they need,” McIntosh said.

Participants were asked to consider what training everyone should have, and what training some SAR volunteers should have.

The final workshop on Thursday was to address prevention.

In 2004, 97 searches were recorded, and four deaths. That number doesn’t include local searches that don’t require resources from headquarters in Iqaluit.

To help cut down on the number of serachs, McIntosh said, volunteers would be reminded to fill out forms describing the cause of the search. That information could be used to help target specific groups, such as young people or southerners, who cause the most searches.

On Thursday, Community and Government Services Minister Levinia Brown planned to unveil a new safety campaign for people going out on the land.

Search and rescue groups also looked forward to getting new GPS equipment, binoculars and first aid kits, purchased with the $500,000 funding from CGS offered this year only to enhance Nunavut’s search and rescue. Funding for the conference also came from this pot.