The Sunshine Coast Ground Search and Rescue (SAR) volunteers had a busy 24 hour period on Tuesday.
First, approximately 24 SAR volunteers were part of a coordinated effort with shíshálh Nation and the Sunshine Coast RCMP to search for a missing youth in Sechelt overnight. The search began after midnight on Aug. 29, during a thunder and lightning storm. The girl was located safe the next morning.
Then at 2:30 p.m., SAR was called upon again, this time to Gambier Island. The ambulance service notified them that there was a hiker on the Mt. Killam trail in need of medical assistance for chest pain — a potentially life-threatening reaction to a possible bee sting. North Shore Rescue was contacted to respond with a physician via helicopter, but again the weather became a challenging factor.
“The weather socked in,” SAR manager Alec Tebbutt told Coast Reporter. “So what they ended up doing was dropping, lowering the doctor and another SAR member to the trail at a lower elevation, and then they went up to the subject.”
They weren’t able to extract the hiker via helicopter, so the ground SAR crew left for Gambier Island. RCMSAR Station 14 (Gibsons) helped transport the ground crew to the island, and the Gambier Fire Department and island locals helped move teams between the wharf and the trail.
The hiker, a local man in his 60s, was not able to hike out himself, so SAR volunteers prepared to hike in a stretcher. After resting, the hiker was able to walk down slowly with members from North Shore Rescue. Once at the shoreline, RCMSAR Station 1 (Horseshoe Bay) transported the hiker and physician back to Vancouver for treatment. All said, it was after 10 p.m. when the response concluded.
Around 24 Sunshine Coast SAR members attended the second call, and approximately half of them had also responded to the previous overnight call.
For both calls, Tebbutt said that collaboration between various groups “was one of the beauties of the whole thing” along with making quick calls to loop in SAR.
