SUNDRE – Residents as well as motorists who are either driving to or through town this Saturday need not be alarmed by what will appear to be a substantial emergency response in the vicinity of the Sundre Seniors’ Supportive Living facility.
Mountain View Seniors’ Housing (MVSH) officials said a training exercise will be taking place this weekend, according to a statement issued earlier this week.
“Search and rescue is an essential emergency service, and we are excited to have the Search and Rescue Association of Alberta working in the Sundre community on May 5 and 6 to enhance service response,” Stacey Stilling, MVSH chief administrative officer, was quoted as saying in the release.
“With the staging area in close proximity to our Sundre Seniors’ Supportive Living Facility in Sundre, we want to inform the community it is only a training exercise. We will have a part to play in the exercise as the scenario involves an actor who has ‘exited’ a safe area of our building, but there is no cause for alarm.”
Also participating are members of the Sundre Search and Rescue Association, confirmed the group’s president.
But the training exercise is primarily intended to help MVSH iron out any potential wrinkles in its emergency preparedness response in the event a resident goes missing to ensure a smoothly coordinated search effort, said Roger Tetreault.
“It’s (MVSH’s) exercise, we’re part of it,” Tetreault told the Albertan.
The training that starts today – Friday, May 5 – will be conducted indoors at the facility as a tabletop exercise. The mock search part of the training then takes place the following day, he said.
“There will be people walking around town on Saturday," he said.
MVSH is the non-profit organization that operates lodges, seniors’ life leases as well as self-contained apartments, and subsidized community housing in Carstairs, Didsbury, Olds, Sundre and Cremona.
The Search and Rescue Association of Alberta represents 33 search and rescue organizations throughout the province, which represents more than 1,400 volunteers. Over the span of 30 years, the association has worked alongside police services to organize search and rescue operations on the ground.
Funding from the federal government allocated toward the Search and Rescue New Initiatives Fund annually contributes about $7.6 million toward projects and programs that help to improve search and rescue preparedness in Canada.
The search and rescue system draws on the resources and expertise of partners at all levels of government, Indigenous communities, volunteers and the private sector, reads background information in the press release.
