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Are we prepared?:
P. 13
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
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Ladysmith to examine early development indicators Craig Spence THE CHRONICLE
Search ane rescue members practice evacuating an injured person from a beach during a May training exercise.
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SAR gets real about getting ready Craig Spence THE CHRONICLE
Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Those are the last words anyone wants to hear, or even worse, to have to shout into a marine radio. But it’s good to know when the call is broadcast, there’s somebody close at hand, ready to respond at a moment’s notice. If you’re ever in trouble off Ladysmith, the volunteers for Royal Canadian Marine Search & Rescue Station 29 will likely be the first people you’ll see speeding your way in their rigid hulled inflatable. To make sure they’re ready as they can be for anything, a contingent of Ladysmith’s SAR members, including Daren Forster and Station Master Karen Bowen, attended a large scale exercise May 23 and 24 near Gibsons.
SAR teams from up and down the coast converged to join in a series of exercises that involved rescues on the water, on land and from the air. They left better prepared to deal with the real thing. Forster said the meticulously staged enactments gave him an unforgettable sense of what it will be like, if and when he is called on to respond to an emergency. “I’ve been on the water most of my life as a recreational sailor, but as a job I’m a food broker,” he said. “All the scenarios were so realistic, and everything was happening so fast! It was all designed to have our training kick in.” Emergency responders have to maintain discipline and carry out their specific roles and tasks in situations where everyone else is panicking, and where priorities can change in an instant. They have to act as a team.
Real life enactments are a crucial – and exciting – part of their training. “To us, because it’s so realistic and it all happens so fast, we have to control our adrenaline,” Forster explained. “The more realistic the scenario, the better the training.” Bowen, who played the role of a victim in the exercise, said all the stops were pulled to make it real. “The makeup was amazing. The people from the movie industry in Vancouver – they volunteered their time to do it.” So intense was the experience, she said “some of the guys, their hands were shaking” when they were confronted with the scenes they had to deal with. Her group enacted a shore exercise. Seven campers were on a beach when a propane tank exploded. It took over an hour for the makeup artists to recreate See Search & Rescue page 7
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Service providers are trying to determine why children in Ladysmith are not faring better on the Early Development Instrument, a study conducted in kindergartens province-wide that projects students’ readiness for success in school. “It’s quite a validated and quite a useful tool,” said Dr. Paul Hasselback, medical health officer with the Vancouver Island Health Authority. “The students who are vulnerable on the EDI score tend to have problems later on.” The latest EDI results, which can be pinpointed to specific regions, show that children in the Ladysmith area are not performing as well as expected. Socioeconomic data for Ladysmith would normally lead to better results on the EDI score. “I do think that within the Ladysmith region there should be some concern,” Hasselback said. The higher the rating on the EDI, the more children are vulnerable. Provincially EDI ratings average out at 30 percent; Ladysmith’s number is 40 percent. The best areas of the province achieve scores of 20 percent. “What we’ve seen for Ladysmith specifically, is that this EDI score has continued to increase over time, and just over 40 percent of students are vulnerable,” Hasselback said. Typically a high EDI score is associated with regions where there are also higher rates of poverty, more single income families, and more people on social assistance. High EDI ratings are usually reflected in lower graduation rates, fewer students moving on to post secondary education, and reduced chances of ‘future wellbeing.’ What’s puzzling service providers is that Ladysmith’s socioeconomic indicators are not in line with the area’s EDI results. “Ladysmith is actually much closer to the rest of the province or the Island when it comes to socioeconomic indicators,” Hasselback said. “Normally these are fairly closely aligned. See Early Development page 5