On September 19th, North Shore Rescue deployed a province-first technology to locate an e-biker who’d gone missing near Nanaimo, B.C.
The e-biker had been riding in the Doumont trail network on the 18th but hadn’t been seen since. Suspecting the e-biker was lost or stranded, Nanaimo Search and Rescue dispatched a team at 3:17 a.m. The team set up its staging area at The Black Bear Pub in Nanaimo, calling in North Shore Rescue to use its new Lifeseeker unit.
Created by Spanish company Centum, the Lifeseeker unit is a portable cell tower that can be mounted on a helicopter or a 4×4. It uses an antenna, hardware, and software to locate active phones over large areas. When turned on, phones send out signals to nearby cell towers to maintain their network connection. But in remote areas, such as the Doumont trail network, where there aren’t any cell towers, phones lose their network connection making it difficult for search and rescue teams to track the phone’s signal.
That’s where the Lifeseeker unit comes in. It acts as a cell tower, communicating with active phones in remote areas, allowing the search and rescue teams to triangulate the missing person’s location to within five metres. The unit, however, has built-in privacy settings, so search and rescue teams are only able to locate a phone if the police have provided them with the phone’s International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number or the user’s International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number. The phone’s network carrier provides these numbers to the police under B.C.’s Missing Persons Act. If the missing person’s phone is out of battery or turned off, Lifeseeker won’t be able to locate it.
In this case, the missing e-biker’s phone was still active. With the Lifeseeker unit mounted on an AStar helicopter, North Shore Rescue was able to track the phone’s signal, locating the e-biker later that afternoon. The e-biker was alive and well when North Shore Rescue arrived. The team extracted the e-biker via helicopter for further assessment and treatment.
“This was a significant milestone. It marks our first real operational deployment—and our first success—for our LifeSeeker unit. It is the first-of-its-kind LifeSeeker find for a volunteer ground SAR (Search and Rescue) team in B.C., and perhaps in Canada,” North Shore Rescue said in a statement.
The Lifeseeker technology is still new in search and rescue missions, even on a global scale. According to Centum, 35 teams across four continents have completed 220 successful missions using the Lifeseeker unit.
North Shore Rescue has a history of being at the forefront of new technology. The volunteer-run team based in Vancouver was founded in 1965 as an urban search and rescue unit. It was created in reaction to growing Cold War tensions, specifically the fear that Russia might drop a nuclear warhead near B.C. Team members were trained in building reinforcement, welding, nuclear fallout measurement, riot control, fire fighting, auto extrication, and first aid.
After the Cold War, the team turned its attention to wilderness rescues. It was one of the first B.C. search and rescue teams to train members in human tracking, use of search dogs, establish a dive team, and develop special protocols for treating hypothermia victims. The Lifeseeker unit is the team’s most recent step in modernizing search and rescue protocols.
“We would like to specifically acknowledge the financial assistance from the Rotary Club of West Vancouver Sunrise (and their Rotary Ride for Rescue fundraising), and the many donations from the community that enabled us to purchase, mount, train on, and operate this very expensive and highly useful piece of technology,” the team said.
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