The Southeast Saskatchewan Search and Rescue chapter is looking to start focusing more on training, starting tonight at their AGM.

President and founding member Katia Bigney says that'll be for new and old members.

"This year we're putting a huge emphasis on training. We will be hopefully doing a new ground search and rescue group training for new members and then this year we're focusing on our ground search and rescue recertification for members that were trained in 2019. When we first started, we had over 20 members trained for ground searching and so they need to be recertified." 

"Our chapter currently does not have any validated team leaders and we've had seven members complete their ICS 200 which is required prior to taking team leader. That is the other huge emphasis for our chapter this year, along with renewing and refreshing all of the skills that we have through ground search and rescue." 

Those skills have been put to good use, as the chapter was called in a few times to help the RCMP.

"Last year was a monumental year. We had three province-wide searches where every chapter in the province was activated and we've never had a province-wide activated search where all chapters were activated till last year. Last year we didn't have one, but we had three of them. Currently this year our chapter was called out to Esterhazy search to assist the RCMP there, that was last month in May." 

At tonight's meeting, they're hoping to get people caught up to speed and show off some of the recent donations which have kept them running.

"We encourage all of our Members to attend, which most of them are, but we'd like as many interested and prospective new members to come, whether it's friends, family, coworkers of our members, or just anyone from the public who's interested in coming. We would love it if they would attend our meeting tonight, it's open to the public."

"We're going to be going over all of our committee reports, but two major things that we're doing this evening is we have our instant command trailer that was donated by the Bayliss family from Carnduff and our brand new Incident Command Truck that pulls the trailer that was donated by the Lomond RM just South of Weyburn, that's going to be on display this evening too. Then we're going to have a presentation on how a star subchapter is activated to assist the local police agency or RCMP."

Bigney encourages everyone interested to come out for the event at the Weyburn Fire Hall. Those who can't come out but are still interested in joining can contact her at 306-483-8615.