When extra help is needed most
The CRASH Team is a brand new, locally driven, specialist emergency response unit built for the west country region of Alberta and its most dangerous and complex emergencies.
The CRASH Team is a charity initiative created by two experienced local firefighters who recognized the need to better manage the unique hazards and challenges of emergency response in the Sundre area and Eastern Rocky Mountain Slopes region of Alberta (also known as “the west country”).
Based in the heart of west-central Alberta, we respond rapidly to high-risk situations where existing traditional emergency response resources may be in need of extra capacity, specialized capabilities, have long response times, or are simply overextended.
In many rural areas, fire-rescue services rely on volunteers whose availability can vary by the minute. The CRASH Team helps ensure critical emergencies are never left waiting by providing consistent, full-time coverage by highly qualified and experienced response personnel. At present, additional and/or specialized response resources are hours away and can be unable to assist due to weather, topographic, or hazardous conditions. The strategic location of the Crash Team in Sundre, Alberta, means reliable, professional fire-rescue and specialist response services are available and able to respond quickly throughout the remote west country region, even during the most challenging conditions.
Inspired by models like STARS, the CRASH Team is a charity and not-for-profit solution created not to replace existing emergency services, but to work alongside them and assist during the most time-critical and complex calls. We operate short-duration, high-impact missions, providing specialized and advanced technical skills and support until the immediate danger is resolved. Our focus is on fostering collaboration and leveraging local resources to address pressing emergency response challenges more efficiently and effectively. This will both improve local responder safety during routine and particularly challenging events, and create solid, mutually beneficial working relationships between local resources and the new specialist CRASH Team.
To succeed, the CRASH Team relies entirely on strong partnerships with local agencies, community hosts, and people like you. Your support, whether through collaboration, awareness, or donation, helps ensure this team is trained, equipped, and ready to respond when lives are on the line.
Alberta’s “west country” region
CRASH Team Coverage Area
Our Services
Our team of fully qualified firefighters and rescue specialists will be immediately available within the region full-time to assist local emergency response agencies whenever their expertise and skillsets could be useful. This includes when complex or severe emergencies occur, such as:
rapid wildland urban interface fires
tornadoes and severe storms
floods and flash floods
land/rock/mud slides and avalanches
incidents in remote and/or mountainous terrain
multiple casualty incidents
multi-vehicle incidents
building collapses
and advanced expertise is required to improve response safety, capabilities, and patient outcomes.
This also includes when local resources are over-extended (which can happen on busy days, during staffing challenges, or large-scale incidents) to provide additional trained firefighters for routine support.
The CRASH team’s purpose is to maintain skillsets in both professional firefighting and more unique technical fire-rescue disciplines that target specific hazards in the region. More and more frequently, responses complexities and severe hazards require capabilities that go beyond those currently taught in rescue courses, nor readily available in the region.
These skills are often expensive, time-consuming, and complicated for local agencies to obtain and maintain. The CRASH Team will be able to offer these capabilities for free to all local resources whenever they are needed most to improve patient outcomes and responder safety.
Additionally, the CRASH Team will be able to offer cross training opportunities to local responders - improving their safety and capabilities while offering unique training they will find beneficial and not typically have access to anywhere else.
When not assisting with emergency responses, the CRASH Team will be undertaking preparedness and prevention activities within the local region.
The west-central region of Alberta, extending from Watervalley and Bighorn County in the south, to Clearwater County in the north and encompassing the Rocky Mountain Eastern slopes is a vast, remote and topographically dynamic area. It faces nearly every natural hazard present in Alberta and is seeing a surge in tourism, residents, and area users and investors.
This means more people are exposed to severe hazards in the region and are experiencing more complex emergency incidents. More work in local preparedness and proactive empowerment is needed to improve safety and take mounting pressures off of local public safety services who have to manage these evolving and escalating response situations. This is work that the CRASH Team is prepared and qualified to undertake with enthusiasm and vast local response knowledge.
About Our Team
Our not-for-profit charity organization entirely funded through donations. It is staffed by dedicated local fire-rescue professionals who already serve as volunteer and paid first responders in the community, making them intimately familiar with the region, its challenges, and existing response gaps. They also maintain specific technical abilities that go beyond traditional fire-rescue skill-sets and courses and bring decades of experience in international, federal, provincial and local emergency response, using it to respond professionally to any scale and severity of emergency incident.
This team also anticipates, monitors, plans, and trains for the specific threats and hazards present throughout the west-central eastern rocky mountain region. They respond immediately upon request to emergency incidents in collaboration and cooperation with existing first response resources to support them, and the public, by putting their unique capabilities to work.
They remain response ready at all times and can respond in a crew apparatus with specialty equipment. The ultimate goal of the Team is to be hosted by a local fire-department and have use of their apparatus and equipment. As a benefit to the hosting department, Team members will also serve as volunteer members on the fire department and participate as needed in routine fire responses and training, when not doing Team responses.
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Follow the CRASH Team on instagram. We are committed to being transparent with our operations and sharing information regarding training activities, networking efforts, and opportunities to participate and get involved in community preparedness initiatives.
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