Lethbridge search and rescue’s task: to find what’s missing

By Cal Braid - Lethbridge Herald Local Journalism Initiative Reporter on December 24, 2022.

Herald photo by Cal Braid Janeal Mick, a search manager with the Lethbridge and Area Search and Rescue Association, and her dog Guinness, are ready to called out to help in a variety of search and rescue scenarios.

The Lethbridge and Area Search and Rescue Association (LASARA) is a local non-profit whose primary focus is serving as skilled search assistance to the police. Janeal Mick is a search manager with LASARA and has been with the association for 11 years.

“We serve Lethbridge of course, so a lot of our work is urban search,” Mick said. “We call ourselves search and rescue because all of our work is basically ground work, but because we have trained people who can be involved in the command center for more complicated rescues.”

Most of their work involves assisting the city police, but they’re occasionally called upon to administer First Aid or to help organize an extraction.

“For me, I started because I wanted to do the dog handling. There’s been some transitions in southern Alberta since then, so we have some dogs under the envelope of LASARA now, whereas before they were a separate dog group. When the Lethbridge Police Service calls us out, they let us know if they have use for the dogs,” she said.

Mick said she’s currently “in between” working dogs. LASARA can only be tasked out by authorized agencies (the police, parks, or a municipality), and they don’t do any private work. Most often, the police force will act as the command unit overseeing a situation and will task LASARA as needed. If a search operation requires additional resources or a technology like drones, the police force is the agency that approves those.

Within the city, LASARA is often tasked with evidence searching.

“They call us out to look for the actual evidence,” Mick said. “Sometimes they just call us to eliminate areas or to make sure there are no weapons in an area. Sometimes we have to do a more intensive search, and we go door-to-door asking people if we can search the backyards. In (two) cases-a double homicide and an attack of a woman on her way to work-LASARA found the weapons utilized in the crime. If we find anything at all, we keep the area under control. We don’t approach it and we don’t touch anything. We phone command and they deploy forensics to come out to do their work.” The search team takes notes to preserve the chain of custody for investigative and legal purposes.

The urban topography in Lethbridge includes a river, riparian woodlands, and a bridge that all pose dangers.

“In the city we have done lots of missing people searches but it’s usually in the coulees for somebody who went out and didn’t come home. We are also looking for despondents in the park. We have to do some of the really tragic ones like that. Then we have drownings in the park too, so we have to do shoreline searches and things like that; looking for clues to try to pin down where they are.” Search managers use their knowledge of the topography to set out distance rings and identify high-priority areas, while using stats and books to help determine the probability of detection.

Mick said that this year she’s been a part of five searches, but some years she’ll do as many as 15. LASARA also delivers AdventureSmart safety programs for children and youth as a preventative measure. AdventureSmart is a nationally-designed program, and LASARA volunteers are trained to teach it.

“It’s just bringing awareness to safe behaviours when they’re out and about,” she said.

The association does their own fundraising and PR work for volunteers, and Mick said that the amount of training and refreshing involved can be quite taxing for the volunteers. Their current roster of volunteers is, “upwards of 40 people.” Depending on schedules, volunteers may or may not be available on short notice. “If we need more, that’s when we call up the mutual aid for search groups. If it’s turning into an urgent search for a kid or something we might make the mutual aid call right away. We would start also planning for second operations so that we don’t use up our search managers in the first operations. Those searches don’t happen too often but they’re highly complex and involved; hundreds and hundreds of man hours.”

Asked how often she feels like her team contributed or made a difference to an operation, she said, “Always we do. Even if we don’t find anything. Because quite honestly if you don’t find something, you know that you’ve eliminated that area for that person who’s gone missing. For evidence searchers it’s the same thing.” She said cases can be advanced and convictions can be made as a result of their collaborative efforts with the police service. “It’s always important when we go out. And it’s always important for families to know that there are people that are working hard to help them out. It’s very frustrating for families to be alone in a situation when they don’t know where somebody is. It’s important to us for people to know that we are doing what we can within the limits of what the enforcement agencies allow us to do. There’s never a time we haven’t helped in some way when we’re out there.”

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