Last Update:
June 2007

Events Calendar

 

The President's Corner

CASARA SASKATCHEWAN - Update

CASARA is pleased to announce that on August 10th - 12th of 2007 Prince Albert will be hosting this years western regional SAREX or search and rescue exercise. The SAREX is high profile annual event within the Search and rescue community and is usually hosted by one of the four western Provinces or Territories. The SAREX brings together air search and rescue teams to hone their skills and techniques working within different geographic regions of Canada. The SAREX involves setting up various search scenarios for each team which can range from searching and homing in on ELT's, to looking for missing persons, aircraft wreckage and various land and water targets both during the day and night. The 2007 Saskatchewan SAREX should see up to approximately 15 aircraft and their crews and possibly an American team from the Civil Air Patrol (CAP). This years SAREX was in the Pas Manitoba which was won by a Saskatchewan team out of Regina consisting of Keith Bjorndal (Pilot), Clarence Demchuk (Navigator), and Richard Barks and Pat Hume (spotters).

CASARA has representatives in most centers and if you are interested in joining please contact the CASARA unit nearest you, which can be found on our website at www.casarasask.ca or contact myself at frank.schuurmans@sasktel.net or 306-731-2000 and I will be more than happy to put you in touch with the CASARA zone nearest you.

So that other may live

Frank Schuurmans, 

Provincial President 
CASARA Saskatchewan

CASARA Saskatchewan President's 

OPENING REMARKS - 2007 CASARA AGM in Saskatoon

I would like to first of all welcome everyone to Saskatoon for our Annual General Meeting. Its nice to see so many people take time off from their busy personnel schedules to attend this meeting in addition to your contribution throughout the Year. Once again Casara has operated a safe and successful operation, I congratulate all of you for your part in this tremendous success.

At this point I would like to introduce our quests this year:

  • Mr. Dennis Ziebree our CLO from Winnipeg

  • Mr. Ben Toendress our new CLO from Winnipeg

  • Mr. Luio Paronuzzi from RCC Trenton

This past year has been an uneventful year for CASARA Saskatchewan from a search perspective with the usual volume of RCMP call outs and several ELT call outs.

The weather gods were kind to us this past year and we were able to send several teams to the western regional sarex in the Pas Manitoba, from June 30th to July 2, I know the crews that went had a great time found it very informative. The pas sarex was well run and attended setting a new bench mark, so the pressure is on as you all know we will be hosting this years SAREX.  This years Western regional Sarex is being hosted by Saskatchewan in Prince Albert on August 10th to 12th. More about this later.

Based on requests I received from our zones I was able through a equipment submission and rational to receive some new equipment, this year, namely  additional homers, practice elts, and  several new laptops one for our Provincial dispatcher and one for zone 7 and one for zone  4. As always if any of the zones need new equipment please let me know and we will do our best to see if we can obtain it.

Spending our Training budget in a planed manner is an ongoing challenge with most of our training crammed into the fall and winter season due in large part to the nature of the agriculture based workforce within the Province. The good news on the budget side of things is that we saw a slight increase in overall funding. Two things of note is that this year we were slightly below our required 50% flying requirement. We are actually at 49.7 but this year we should not have a problem with the upcoming SAREX and other planned activities.

One of the exciting planned activities this year is a fairly large multi-jurisdictional exercise involving the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) the RCMP, Ground groups from SARSAV and possibly the border patrol. From a CASARA perspective this would involve as many aircraft as we could task ideally most of the Zones 7 and 8 and one or two aircraft from any other zone interested in attending. The exercise would potentially run the entire length of the border and involve all the agencies in one form or the other.  As I finalize details of this event with the various parties Ill forward the information on.

Some new national initiatives and news, this year include: 

  • CASARA display boards (as shown in the front of your contacts binder) are waiting to be sent across Canada to all the member organizations pending input. The input required is that we have to provide 6 digital photos (840 x 1680 pixels) which represent our Province, these can be zone exercise's or members in training etc, that we can submit.

  • The CMS system is now live, Cindy and I will touch on this later today.

  • CASARA's new 5 year contribution agreement signed last year will ensure that there is no delay in receiving this Aprils funding.

  • Our training budget this year is up slightly. All CASARA equipment to be written off now has to be returned to National, so that they may salvage any required parts etc.

  • We now have our very own CASARA Saskatchewan Jacket, which I think will give us a very professional image. It looks like the other Provinces are also going with this style. We need a minimum of 12 jackets for an order, so if you have members interested let me know and when we reach our minimum we will submit an order. I have given each of you a sample of a ball cap we were thinking of giving out as part of the registration for this years SAREX or as a standard CASARA Sask item. You can give me you feed back on this in our discussion on the SAREX.

  • A deployable communication / survival kit developed by CASARA and Irvin Aerospace, was officially adopted by CASARA along with operational protocols  but not without much debate and feed back which is still ongoing. We will soon be in the process of seeking NIF funding to provide these units throughout CANADA once the next call for NIF proposals comes out. Its interesting to note that the Arctic spark kit was very well received by the Inuit and northern communities so much so that a short documentary was done in Rankin Inlet profiling the Arctic spark and its potential life saving capability in an area where sar response times are critical. 

  • The new National SAR Frequency is still ongoing as there is some problem in having a frequency assigned due to the fact that aerial fire fighting refuelling trucks etc were using up any unallocated frequencies that were available. Discussions are ongoing with Industry Canada.

  • As a reminder there is no charge to CASARA aircraft for landing at a military airports provided that you are on CASARA business and you use the call sign CASARA and aircraft ident. This may be applicable down south for the Moose Jaw base or Cold Lake.

  • RCMP - Mr. Barry Benard our RCMP contact over the last couple of years has moved on and we now have a new contact person namely Ken Mataechuck. Vaughn will be providing further details in his dispatch report about Ken and his backups.

  • Insurance - CASARA is looking at some of the liability issues of taking non CASAR members on CASARA flights this could be resolved with a waiver this is all currently under review, if you have any questions on this pleas feel free to contact me if you require information for any media flights etc.

  • Helicopters - CASARA's use of helicopters - currently due to their high operating cost CASARA does not endorse the use of Helicopters for training.  CASARA will be addressing the helicopter issue within the policy manual.

In closing I would like to thank my employer SPM for allowing me to  fulfil my various CASARA obligations but more importantly Every search we do in this Province would not have been possible without you and your members and we appreciate all the time and effort expensed for our life saving and rewarding organization, the time you give is time that you could have spent with your family and friends so I would like to thank You!

Keep up the good work and Thank you.

Schuurmans, Frank