Loss of dive-rescue team could cost lives, critic warns
The Canadian Coast Guard plans to deep-six the dedicated team of divers stationed at its Sea Island Base in Richmond.
The team of search-and-rescue divers had been charged with responding to emergencies off the Lower Mainland. They’re trained to enter wrecked or sunken ships, vehicles and planes to rescue survivors or recover bodies.
But the Coast Guard has told the professional divers they will have to stop going underwater and take on different Coast Guard jobs.
“Those hovercraft still need to run, rescue specialists still have to be there,” said Roger Girouard, the assistant commissioner for the Coast Guard’s western region.
The 26-member Sea Island dive team is the only one of its kind in Canada. It was decided the program was not part of the Coast Guard’s core mandate, according to a statement from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
The cut will save the Coast Guard about $500,000 a year, but it will leave the region less prepared to respond to emergencies where dives are required.
Girouard said members of his staff are talking to the RCMP, Emergency Management B.C., the Vancouver Police Department and Vancouver Fire and Rescue about the change, and the Coast Guard will wait “to make sure that 911 knows who to call” before it cuts the team.
After that point, if there is an emergency, Coast Guard will respond and “lean on the local agencies,” Girouard said. “Understand that search-and-rescue is always a shared responsibility,” he said.
The VPD has a marine unit that maintains security and safety on the water and responds to distress calls, said Staff Sgt. Randy Fincham, a spokesman for the department. But the department “does not have a dive team, nor are we currently looking at deploying one.”
The RCMP does have divers, but they belong to an underwater recovery team that is “responsible for the recovery of human remains and evidence related to criminal investigation,” said Sgt. Annie Linteau, an RCMP spokeswoman.
Fin Donnelly, the federal NDP’s Fisheries and Oceans critic, said the decision “would, unfortunately, put lives at risk.”
“It’s not what we want, especially going into a very busy boating season,” he said.
The dive team has been cut once before by a federal Liberal government, Donnelly noted. That happened in 2001, a few days before a man crashed his car into the Fraser River and died.
“You had Coast Guard officials on site, at the location, but of course they didn’t have the equipment to go in and enter the vehicle and remove the occupant,” Donnelly recalled. “They had to wait until the RCMP dive team was able to get on site and at that point it became a recovery. In a case where there’s emergency response, seconds and minutes matter.”