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It’s early in the afternoon, the cool air and overcast sky typical of late September days looming outside my window. As I sit down at my computer to begin drafting this very article, my attention is snapped away by an insistent, blaring tone suddenly emitting from my pocket. I take out my phone and check my paging app.

Urban search in Laval for missing elderly male with dementia.

Meet at the Hall ASAP. Details to follow.

Without hesitation, I drop everything and inform my colleagues that I’ll be joining them in the emergency response. I throw on my blue-black uniform, grab my bag of essentials, and head out the door. Being a Pointe-Claire resident, it doesn’t take me more than 10 minutes to reach the Hall, and that’s by design — I’m always “Rescue-Ready.”

Since 1951, regular citizens with the Pointe-Claire Volunteer Rescue Unit (PCVRU) have been leading an effort to provide local disaster response, civil security, emergency medical services, and search and rescue capabilities to the city’s population. What began in a basement as the brainchild of World War II veterans wanting to bolster Pointe-Claire’s emergency preparedness has become one of its greatest, if not equally unknown, municipal assets in times of need.

Over its 75 years of existence, the Unit has seen it all. The Dorion level crossing disaster. The Monsanto chemical plant explosion. The Alain Nadeau tragedy at Terra-Cotta Park. The ice storm of 1998. The COVID-19 pandemic. A wide range of unfortunate events — and yet, through it all, they’ve been successful in bringing innumerable missing persons back home and critical patients back to life. They’ve cleared countless fallen trees, pumped millions of litres of water from flooded basements, and given thousands of band-aids with gentle smiles.

I arrive at the rescue station, affectionately known as “the Hall” by members. It’s been at the heart of picturesque Pointe-Claire Village for decades — an old water treatment plant decommissioned in the ‘60s — but you’d never know it. Although it has served us well, we’re set to move into a new building in October, one that will bring us into the fold of the civic centre complex on Saint-Jean Boulevard.

I grab my search and rescue kit bag, my safety helmet, and my hiking boots. If there is a chance that we’ll be searching in a forested area, I want to be prepared. I load up the truck just as my colleagues walk in. It’ll be Ahmad and Andrew’s very first search deployment, but Nader and I have been to many. I start up the truck while Nader updates our status with dispatch.

283 to Central, we are responding to a SAR call in the Ste-Rose area of Laval. Will update you with a better location once we get there.

The Unit’s two dozen members are on call 24/7, 365 days of the year, and regularly refresh their training on a variety of skills and equipment on Wednesday evenings. Packed away inside a fleet of mission-ready emergency vehicles is some of the best equipment available on the market, fit to handle whatever challenge they may have to face next. They are self-reliant, with an executive command structure and officers that are appointed to oversee specific competencies, such as training, fleet and facilities, uniforms, communications, and medical interventions. They are also only the second municipal rescue squad of its kind to exist in the province, as well as the oldest.

These volunteers, of all ages and backgrounds, are some of the finest people I’ve had the pleasure of working with. To know that the few of us are prepared to come together in the spirit of altruism and shared responsibility, with a sense of duty and compassion toward our fellow neighbours when times get tough, makes me incredibly proud to be a part of it all.

Working alongside other member groups of the Québec Association of Search and Rescue Volunteers, we searched into the night, going door to door to verify that the missing man, a well-known local suffering from the cognitive effects of Alzheimer’s, wasn’t wandering around backyards or taking cover inside an unlocked shed. He hadn’t been seen in almost 36 hours — not by people, not by cameras. Frustrations have quietly mounted as we begin to realize that the authorities don’t have any clues to work off. It’s clear to us by the lack of a defined search strategy that we’re flying blind. Unfortunately, hope is running out.

We returned to Pointe-Claire that night without answers. The search had been called off for the time being. That’s just how some calls end, without closure. Mercifully, that’s not what happened in this instance. The next day, we were called back by the Laval police to continue the search operation. This time, they assigned us a search box in an area of dense woods, where thickets chock-full of vines, thorns, and impassable obstacles awaited us. Police had used drones with infrared cameras to scour this no man’s land the day before and had turned up nothing. Now it was our turn to go over it with a fine-tooth comb.

Pretty soon, evidence that we were on the right track started to appear. A woman walking her dog along a nearby road had heard someone shouting in the woods only about 100 metres from our location. I found a branch that had been snapped and twisted in an unnatural direction, the break so fresh that I knew it couldn’t have been more than 12 hours old. Finally, as we neared the end of our search box, another search team that was paralleling us reported that they had found the man, confused, barely clothed, but alive.

As we celebrated the best resolution we could have hoped for, the man was received by paramedics and whisked away to a local hospital for evaluation. I recall Justin, another colleague of mine at the Rescue Unit who had joined me for the second day, smiling wide and saying to me,

“This turned out a lot better than I expected!”

I wholeheartedly agree.

The Pointe-Claire Volunteer Rescue Unit is looking forward to providing its services at the upcoming Grand défi Pierre Lavoie in Valois on October 18th, Dreams Take Flight at Montréal–Trudeau International Airport’s Air Canada hangar on October 25th, and Halloween in Pointe-Claire at the Olive-Urquhart Sports Centre on the same day. In November, you count on them participating in the annual Remembrance Day ceremony at City Hall, as well as being on-site for the Pointe-Claire Ringuette Tournament at the Bob Birnie Arena.

Rian McDonald is the communications officer for the Pointe-Claire Volunteer Rescue Unit. To learn more about what they do or how to join, please visit pcvru.org.