The Purpose of the CRASH Team

The west country region of Alberta is one of the more rural and remote areas of the province, with diverse environments, a plethora of existing and emerging natural hazards, and increasing tourism.

Local first responders face challenges in resources, response times, training and capacity to keep up with increasing response call volumes and complexities. The CRASH Team is designed to assist with these challenges. ‍ ‍

Born of Need

The CRASH Team is carefully designed to fill a gap in emergency response in the west country region, as identified by existing responders. With increasing emergency call volumes, durations, types and complexities, there is a clear need for readily available specialized first responders to be embedded and available within this increasingly busy and naturally hazardous region. By retaining responders with experience, local knowledge, professional qualifications and expertise in complex skillsets imperative to successfully managing even the most difficult of emergency situations, the safety of the public and responders will be vastly improved and evolving emergency events better anticipated and managed when they occur.

Increasing call volumes

Emergency calls are on the rise. Local fire-rescue services responded on average to 23% more calls in 2024 than in 2023. This is a trend continuing since 2020 across the region.

The Pilot Region

Spanning over 6,000 square km of mountains, forests, rivers, grasslands, and backcountry, Alberta’s west-country region is where prairie meets mountain, and modern life meets wild, unpredictable nature.  This area is defined by extreme terrain, breathtaking wilderness, and constant environmental change.

Thousands of kilometers of off-grid trails, rough forestry roads, and river corridors weave through a landscape that sees everything from flash floods to wildfires, windstorms to whiteouts, and avalanche-prone slopes to deep canyoned river valleys. Major rivers (including the Red Deer & Panther Rivers) cut through the area, fed by countless creeks and tributaries.

Many visitors and residents engage in high-risk outdoor activities, including horseback riding, ATV/dirt biking, hunting, whitewater kayaking and rafting, rock and ice climbing, and remote hiking and camping. These activities frequently lead to traumatic injuries and complex rescue situations—often in steep, forested, or riverine terrain far from roads or communication. With many incidents occurring hours from the nearest EMS unit, even minor accidents can quickly become life-threatening.

The region’s industries—oil and gas, timber, agriculture, and tourism—bring in heavy truck traffic, hazardous materials, and industrial hazards, while its natural beauty and eastern Rocky Mountain slopes attracts thousands of backcountry users year-round. 

The west-country area sees an enormous seasonal influx of visitors. With over 3,000 campsites nearby and thousands of random campers filling the region every weekend, the local population can swell from 5,000 to well over 39,000 people during peak seasons.

The region’s remoteness, limited medical infrastructure, and difficult terrain make emergency response lengthy, technical, or resource-intensive. When help is needed out here, it must be the right help, right away.

This is the environment our team is being specifically built to serve.

Learn about our targeted response area

Hazards in the Region

The Sundre area and surrounding region faces a wide range of high-risk hazards. Many of these hazards are unique due to the combination of rugged terrain, unpredictable weather, and remote access. Emergencies here are rarely straightforward and often require complex, coordinated technical responses in hard-to-reach areas.

Traumatic Injuries

Activities like horseback riding, ATV/dirt biking, rock and ice climbing, hunting, and hiking frequently lead to serious injuries such as fractures, head trauma, or spinal injuries (often in areas with difficult terrain and no road access). These incidents can also occur in technically challenging terrain requiring crews to use off-road vehicles, ropes and climbing equipment to reach, extrication tools to free patients trapped in equipment or under rocks/logs/animals/debris, and specific medical equipment to stabilize and protect patients while getting them out and to further care.

Wildlife Encounters & Bear Attacks

As human use of the backcountry grows, so does the risk of encounters with bears, cougars, and moose. The west-country area is considered one of the most active hotspots for grizzly bear encounters and attacks in all of North America. Wildlife attacks often occur far from cell service or medical care. These responses require careful coordination between first responders and Fish and Wildlife officers to ensure public and responder safety, and proper evidence preservation.

Fires

Dry conditions, heavy fuel loads, and slope winds combine to make the region highly susceptible to fast moving wildfires. These fires can cut off access routes, threaten structures, and trap recreational users in isolated areas. The many communities and campgrounds in the region are also built in amoungst the beautiful forests, unfortunately this makes them prime locations susceptible to wildland urban interface fires.

Flash Flooding & Storm Events

Severe storms are now common in all seasons due to the ever changing weather patterns, bringing torrential rainfall that leads to flash flooding, washed-out roads, and landslides, especially in burned, logged, or drought-weakened areas which are common throughout the region. Canyons, riverways, gravel roads, and flood plains are especially susceptible to downpours and result in people trapped in mountainous areas, stranded along backcountry roads, or impacted by flooding in their homes or while camping. Lightning and snow squalls are also very common here and often catch people doing outdoor activities off guard, leaving them vulnerable to hypothermia, lightning strikes, hail injuries, and vehicle accidents on icy mountain roads.

Tornadoes

Severe thunderstorms that form in the Eastern Slopes result in prime conditions for the formation of tornadoes. EF2 and EF4 tornadoes in this region in recent years have caused widespread damage in minutes. Homes and farms in the area are not built to withstand these events, and most residents lack shelter or warning systems. Structures have been demolished and people have narrowly missed being severely injured.

Swiftwater Emergencies

The Red Deer, Panther, and James Rivers (as well as numerous fast-flowing creeks) are popular for paddling, rafting, and fishing. These waterways are cold, powerful, and can change rapidly, leading to capsized boats, entrapments, and drowning incidents. Class IV rapids and waterfalls attract more and more competitive paddlers and boaters, but also present very dangerous conditions to navigate when accidents occur.

Blizzard Conditions & Deep Freeze

Sudden winter storms can drop feet of snow in hours, trapping drivers, isolating backcountry users, and overwhelming rural road systems. Temperatures can drop to -50°C or lower with windchill, creating extreme risk for hypothermia and exposure. This can also make travel and communications within the region nearly impossible; with limited snow clearing equipment trying to cover a massive area and challenging roadways.

Heat Waves

Summer heatwaves can reach over 40°C, increasing risk of dehydration, heatstroke, and cardiac events, especially among seniors, young children, and outdoor workers - all of which frequent the Sundre area in high numbers.

Delayed EMS & Remote Access

Many emergencies happen hours from the nearest ambulance. Complex rescues may require air support, ATVs, and/ or ground crews navigating dense forest, rivers, or cliffs, often with no communication coverage. Severe weather, fog, or darkness often delays or prevents air resources (such as STARS or Kananaskis Public Safety) from responding and at times, responders and patients have had to survive overnight out on the mountains.

Industrial & Traffic Incidents

Heavy truck traffic, oil and gas activity, and hazardous materials transport create risk of collisions, spills, and large scale industrial accidents with significant risk to life or the environment (particularly along the numerous high-speed traffic corridors running through the area). The Town of Sundre itself is a recognized heavy truck corridor and has thousands of hazardous products moving through town every year.

These hazards are real, frequent, and often life-threatening. This environment demands first responders with the training, capacity, and tools to operate beyond the traditional fire-rescue and medical capabilities and more often, engage specialty skillsets to succeed in responding safely and effectively in a region as dynamic and challenging as the “West Country”.

These are the responses our team is being built to assist with.

Existing Response Agencies

The area is currently served by a number of different emergency response agencies with a variety of staffing models and capabilites. Click on each to learn more.

  • Staffing: VOLUNTEER; varying # of members

    The region’s local fire departments respond to a wide variety of emergency incidents including fires, wildfires, vehicle collisions, technical rope, ice, water, and backcountry rescues, hazmat incidents, medical emergencies and more. Fire volunteers leave their home/workplace (when available), get to the firehall when notified of an incident, and respond to emergency callouts in response apparatus (turnout time around 8 minutes notification to deployment). Departments train for 2-3 hours per week, with specialty courses available to some members periodically. Closest fire departments in the region are Sundre, Cremona, Olds, Didsbury, Carstairs, and Caroline Fire Departments.

  • Staffing: Full-time (2 paramedics per ambulance)

    AHS staffs one ambulance in Sundre, with additional ambulances 30 mins + away. EMS ambulances respond to medical emergencies for the purposes of providing patient care and ground transport to hospitals. Local rural ambulances are also utilized to “flex” out of their home community and provide coverage in higher-population areas.

  • Including Peace Officers, Fish and Wildlife, Conservation, and Sheriffs

    Staffing: Full-time or part-time; varying # of staffing.

    Tasked with enforcing the law within their respective branch, managing missing persons cases, and neutralizing active threat during wildlife attacks.

  • Staffing: VOLUNTEER; varying # of members.

    Local volunteer groups who locate people who are lost, missing, or overdue and have some rescue capabilities. Typically activated through RCMP, receive notification of an incident and respond from work/home (when available) to attend response and bring SAR equipment. Take time organize and deploy to ensure searchers are starting in areas most likely to locate person(s). Closest SAR groups in region are Sundre, Water valley, Cochrane and Rocky Mnt SAR.

  • Including STARS, mountain rescue teams, wildlife attack teams and AB Wildfire.

    Staffing: varies by agency

    Called to respond to specific specialty calls (such as critical medical patients for STARS, or patients who require longline helicopter rescue for mountain rescue teams).

    NOTE: these resources are often located a significant distance away (Banff, Canmore, Calgary) and require helicopters to travel to scene, limiting operations in bad weather. Some agencies also have a primary response area which the Sundre area is not a part of, so response is based on availability.

When responding to emergencies in the west country region, Sundre is the closest community with emergency response resources and road access. Response times to places like Panther River and Ya Ha Tinda can take upwards of 1.5 hours from Sundre; and longer if road access is not possible. Mutual aid resources will take longer, so responses can be lengthy and involve multiple methods of transportation including vehicles, ATVs, boats, aircraft, horses and on foot.

Training Challenges

The CRASH Team members will be specifically selected to have professional qualifications and experience in the fire-rescue industry. This will allow them to also focus on non-traditional skillsets and even start designing training for first responders on topics that are not currently covered or taught.

By being full-time employees, with no alternative jobs to split time between, and dedicated work time for training, Team members will able to constantly refine and improve their capabilities - making sure they are leaders in their profession and disciplines.

They are also able to afford (through donations) the more inaccessible specialist training most other agencies cannot.

Courses such as Structural Collapse Specialist & Confined Space Extrication for example. This course covers topics including rescues at structural collapse scenes due to natural disasters or explosions/fires, including shoring, breaching, breaking, lifting and moving rubble and victims. It also covers topics including unstable topography such as landslide/mudslide considerations, and advanced patient extrication techniques for confined spaces and debris. It also costs $7500 USD per person to take, and is 100 hours in length.

The need for capabilities such as these is apparent and quite reasonable as this area experiences tornadoes, rockfalls, mudslides, building collapses, and heavy snow loads that have resulted in challenging and risky patient extrications.  However, the capabilities learned during this course are not formally maintained by any response agency existing in the west-central region of Alberta at present - the CRASH Team intends to maintain and offer capabilities such as these for whenever they are needed.


Learn more about the CRASH Team's capabilities

First responders undertake a lot of training; the challenge with training is that it is expensive, time consuming, and not suitable to everyone.

Volunteer agencies and paid agencies alike have to balance budgets and time commitments they can realistically and justifiably expend on training and often have to focus on a vast array of topics, having time to become generally competent in a diverse set of topics to remain nimble enough to respond to all sorts of varieties of emergencies. Taking specialized training may not be entirely practical and can be even more cumbersome to then maintain.

This is made more difficult for volunteer agencies as personnel have limited training time (balancing paid work as well), high rates of turn over in the services, and even if trained rely on luck or intention to be present and available to respond when a emergency call comes in.

This makes becoming competent in even basic professional response courses a challenge and it takes years to accomplish this feet.

Where the CRASH Team Comes in - the “Gap”

While traditional emergency response service do exist here, the gap or missing response piece becomes apparent when a response becomes complex or hazardous conditions become especially severe. This is where even standard technical rescue training courses and the skills they teach can be overwhelmed or not enough to match the needs of the situation at hand.

When rivers become raging floodways, when a sudden white-out leads to a person driving off a 100ft cliff, or when a large tornado descends upon a community and buries people in collapsed buildings, this is when limits of resources and equipment are pushed and can be exceeded. And with these types of incidents occurring more frequently than ever in this region, additional help and expertise is needed, and it is needed locally to be quick and effective. This is exactly what the CRASH Team intends to provide.

CRASH members will retain traditional and specialist fire-rescue capabilities, but also work to develop their skills further to address local complexities. They have and will attend formal fire-rescue courses in advanced tactics, but also acquire specific informal training from experts in the fields of jet boat operations, expedition medicine, flood/swiftwater rescue, mountain rescue and more, in order to refine their capabilities to target this region’s existing and emerging hazards and complexities. By targeting their skillsets and responses to the low frequency but high consequence emergency situations, they are able to fill the gap in response capabilities that currently exists - so even the most extreme events can be managed safely via the network of local responders, all in support of one another.

FAQs

  • Yes, CRASH is a fire-rescue focused registered charity in Alberta and is also registering as a not-for-profit and registered charity with the CRA.

  • Yes - either through a paid-on-call basis (like an honourarium), hourly, or salary - all depending on donations and operational expenses. Like other not-for-profits, CRASH will aim to have paid professional staff to respond to complex or challenging emergencies in rural and remote settings. This will ensure that advanced capabilities are guaranteed to be immediately available whenever they are needed.

  • At present, this particular region of Alberta experiences thousands of emergency calls annually - however the residential populations remain low in such a vast and rural region. Many of these calls result from non-resident area users (such as tourists / backcountry users, seasonal populations, and commuting workers). This means that while emergencies are frequent, the local communities’ tax bases are low - which is primarily how traditional emergency services are funded.

    By raising funds via donations, residents, area users, stakeholders, companies, and visitors alike can contribute directly to increased public safety specialty capabilities and coverage throughout the region they use - which also directly supports the existing emergency services of Police, Fire and Ambulance.

  • CRASH will fill a significant and clearly identified gap in rural first response in AB; urban centers have paid fire-rescue specialist teams they can leverage anytime, however rural regions typically do not.

    With increasing populations and area users – including backcountry users – in a region that faces a plethora of existing and emerging natural and man-made hazards, emergency response complexity and frequency are increasing and would benefit from increased first responder presence, specialty resources and capabilities.

  • CRASH’s focus is on providing response capabilities via specialists proficient in topics like complex technical rescue, unique auto extrication, collapse/debris zone operations, complex terrain rescue, whitewater/ complex swift water rescue, advanced field medicine, and hazard-specific response tactics (typically needed during events like tornado, flood and WUI fires) to add to & expand (not duplicate) existing first response capabilities in the region.

    CRASH will focus on the capabilities other agencies are unable to, but that can be critical during the more high-risk, but low frequency events. These are slightly different, but complimentary skillsets, to Fire, SAR, and STARS – who primarily focus on maintaining more generalized response capabilities targeting a wider variety of skillsets, or like STARS, have very specific and entirely different mandates.

  • While there are specialist fire-rescue teams in larger cities, these are not typically available or able to respond to remote regions or beyond certain boundaries. They also vary in they types of specialist capabilities and equipment they maintain, and can take hours to deploy to a region and terrain they may be unfamiliar with. CRASH will fill a gap in first response that is complimentary to EMS, volunteer SAR or fire-rescue department mandates. CRASH focuses on retaining advanced critical tactical skillsets and unique specialties that target the region’s hazards and will have the largest benefit for all first response agencies and the public.

    CRASH respects and will work in conjunction with EMS, SAR and fire departments, supporting their mandates while helping to improve public safety and expanding the response capabilities available to the region through their own unique but complimentary mandate. CRASH Team members are all also volunteer SAR and fire department members who will continue to serve their communities and agencies.

  • The skillsets that CRASH Team members will retain take years of dedicated training and research to achieve proficiency and maintain expertise in. They require extensive, regular practice to maintain, costly equipment and certification, and a high level of aptitude and fitness by participants to undertake. The amount of time and investment these specialties take to develop and maintain is often not justifiable when response agencies have so many other skillsets to maintain and are limited by budgetary and time constraints, as well as staffing.

    These agencies also often operate under a volunteer system for a variety of reasons, which means responders who may have particular specialties may not be available to respond when applicable incidents occur.