Calgary Journal Online

Calgary’s Aquatic Rescue Team prepares for busiest season of the year patrolling our city’s waterways

On a hot summer day, the sparkling waters of the Glenmore Reservoir or the Bow River can seem so innocent, but the Calgary Fire Department’s Aquatic Rescue Team knows that the dark depths can hold some terrible secrets – from bodies to weapons.

The team works hard to make sure Calgarians are aware of the duplicitous nature of one of their favourite summer playgrounds.

“The water can be a very dangerous thing, even when you think it’s not going to be a dangerous thing,” said Damian Duncan, a senior firefighter and member of the water rescue team.

Danger is something the rescue team thinks about every day. Their job is to help keep Calgarians safe on the water – and to be there when something goes disastrously wrong.

The team works the water all year, doing ice diving and rescues during the winter, but the really busy time comes when the ice starts to melt.

“You get all the run-off,” said firefighter Tristan Shanks, who’s been a member of the rescue team for about six months. “Obviously the river levels (are) going to go higher, the currents (are) going to be stronger (and) faster, there’ll be a lot more stuff in the water, it’ll be dirtier, we’re going to have warm weather and people are going to head down to the river, and that’s going to increase the call volume that we have,” he added. “So it just gets busier and more dangerous.”

While run-off makes spring one of the most dangerous seasons, nothing tops summer when it comes to numbers.

“The summer is of course the busiest because that is when a lot of Calgarians are out having fun rafting,” Duncan said. “It’s not uncommon for us to see a few hundred, if not a thousand rafts on the river on a weekend and full of people.”

The rescue team doesn’t have the authority to police the river, so they can’t enforce the laws, but they can encourage people to remember that the laws are intended to keep people safe.

The Bow River and other waterways in Calgary provide us with endless hours of summer fun, but for the fire department's Aquatic Rescue Team, working on and below these chilly waves can be a grueling task - both physically and emotionally.

Photo: Elisabeth Heslop/ Calgary Journal

Most people know that the law requires boaters to have a life-preserver with them in their water craft, but Calgary also has a bylaw requiring anyone on the water to actually be wearing their life-preserver at all times.

Duncan said this is a very important aspect of staying safe on the water.

“A lot of people think…they can swim just fine, but unfortunately if you’re unconscious, you can’t swim, and that’s why they make the law that you have to wear your life-jackets, because you don’t always know the situation you’re going to be in,” he said.

Duncan added that sometimes people get into dangerous situations because they don’t think ahead before going out on the water.

“Sometimes people just have little inner tubes and stuff like that, that aren’t very safe in some of the circumstances of the water,” he said. “The other thing people try to do a lot is they’ll have four or five rafts together and they’ll tie them all together so that they can float together,” Duncan added.

“That actually creates a hazard because of the bridge abutments on the way down the river. People can get tangled around those. That’s a common call for us in the summer – one dinghy will go on one side, one dinghy on the other side, and now you’re hung up on the bridge abutment. And, unfortunately we had a lady drown that way a couple years ago, so it can be very, very dangerous.”

In addition to patrolling the rivers and helping out Calgarians who get stuck in tough situations on the water, the Aquatic Rescue Team has other duties – less enjoyable duties.

From body recovery to the gruelling grid searches for evidence tossed in the water by criminals, the firefighters said the job takes an emotional toll on the divers and aquatic specialists who do the work.

“Every call’s different, so there could be different challenges on every call,” Shanks said. “We don’t go into the day thinking about…what kind of challenge (we’re) going to have because you don’t know. You just try and be prepared each time.”

Lorne Webber is a captain at Fire Station No. 1 in downtown Calgary and a shift co-ordinator for the primary unit of the rescue team, based at No. 1 station.

"The emotional side of the job, dealing with dead bodies, of course firemen in general are…no stranger to going to those kinds of things, but dive's a little different,” Webber said. “Often the bodies have been in the river for a long time, so of course there it's not a very nice sight to go and deal with those issues. In that sense, usually when we go to fire-type things, we're not dealing with the body as much, whereas with dive we have to go and recover the body and get it to shore…So that of course takes a toll on the divers, it takes a toll on the officers.

“I honestly don't like sending the divers to do that work. It's not very nice stuff to accomplish," he added.

Webber said that many of the divers are young firefighters in the early years of their careers and most of them haven’t had to deal much with the gruesomeness of death before.

“The first time they have to go out and do it, I see the effect it has on them,” he said.

Webber said that Calgary has a “critical incident stress” program that trains workers on how to debrief emergency personnel and witnesses involved in stressful situations like body recovery.

“I think that's been really important,” Webber said. “In the past, we didn't have anything like that, so the sum total of counselling was talking with other firefighters when you got back to the hall, and if they knew you were having trouble they would try and…talk you through not dwelling on that, and dwelling on the good part of it – that you've accomplished something that's necessary.”

Sometimes, Webber said, a day’s work isn’t so much emotionally taxing as simply physically gruelling.

“If the police there want a particular thing to be found, we might have to search (the area) many times before we find it. But sometimes it goes the other way – (one day) we went to search for one knife and found seven knives,” Webber said with a chuckle. “So they kept bringing up knives, and we go 'no, that's not the one,' so it went in the box and they went back down and then finally 'yeah, that's the one we're looking for.' So it was kind of comical in a way, but nevertheless it was a lot of work. We dove the whole day at that place."

Part of what makes such searches so difficult is the underwater conditions in our climate.

“A lot of the lakes and diving in and around Calgary is what we call zero-visibility diving,” Duncan said. “So when you’re diving there’s so much mud and there’s so much silt, you literally cannot see your hand in front of your face, so it’s like diving in a black room.”

Add to that the fact that most of the lakes and rivers in our area are often cold year-round, and the divers face some tough challenges. But for people like Duncan, Webber, Shanks and the 45 other members of the Aquatic Rescue Team, their commitment is well described in their team motto – facta non verba, or “deeds, not words.”