This summer in Jasper several people were killed as a result of serious accidents. A cyclist crashed near the Athabasca Glacier; a Canadian Forces soldier lost control of her motorcycle on Maligne Lake Road; a serious collision between a car and a motorhome killed four tourists.
Just last week, tragedy struck again when a woman was killed after her car veered into the path of a transport truck.
Every summer, as tourists flock to the park, a new swath of fatalities hits Jasper. And it is the town’s first responders—firefighters, police officers, paramedics, Parks Canada personnel and others—who deal with the aftermath.
Serious accidents are common here, especially considering the town’s size, and the calls Jasper’s first responders attend to can take a mental toll.
“The average person, if they’re lucky, only comes across something along that magnitude once or twice ... but we’re constantly exposing ourselves over and over again,” Deputy Fire Chief Don Smith pointed out in an interview Sept. 8.
That kind of exposure—whether it’s to a fatal car accident or a climbers’ fall from the side of a mountain—takes an emotional toll. It’s different for every first responder, and each handles it in their own way, but even the toughest people still get shaken.
“I think everybody has their moments,” said Corp. Ryan Gardiner of the Jasper RCMP. “It’s normal that you’re going to have a reaction of some sort —I think it would be pretty weird if you didn’t.”
As a police officer, Gardiner said, he often has to go straight from one bad call to the next, with little time to process his thoughts or emotions in between. It’s part of his job, and after a while you get used to compartmentalizing, but it can catch up with you at the end of the day.
Keeping that in mind, Gardiner gives himself time to process the days events—usually while he’s being physically active, either on his mountain bike or at the gym.
“That’s kind of how I dealt with it over the years, it’s just been keeping physically fit so that after a tough day you go for a workout and you feel better,” he said. “If your body’s healthy, your mind is healthy too.”
And while for years first responders learned to deal with trauma on their own, these days organizations like the RCMP and fire brigade take the mental health of their employees very seriously.
According to Fire Chief Greg Van Tighem, that’s why Jasper has a team trained to the standards of the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation (ICISF).
That team is there to ensure the ongoing mental health of Jasper’s emergency crews and follows the Mitchell Model. The model uses a system of varying degrees of intervention to give responders a chance to decompress after a serious incident.
Van Tighem explained that, after every high trauma event he—or someone else with the training—conducts a diffusion session with the crew that responded.
Diffusions are the initial interventions conducted just after the crew returns from a call. They are informal (rank isn’t an issue) and intend to give responders a chance to voice how they feel about the call.
Gardiner said the sessions are great, because they provide a venue for emergency personnel to let off steam with others who understand what they are going through.
“Really it’s a venue where everything is confidential: what’s talked about in that room stays in that room. It does give you that opportunity to talk about that incident uncensored. You can say what you want, and get it off your chest.
“You get a chance to see, ‘jeez, I’m not the only one who’s got those feelings, and it’s normal.’
“For me to go sit down with somebody who wasn’t a first responder and tell them all this stuff, that’s not really appropriate.
“It just helps a lot to sit down with other first responders.”
But the Mitchell Model also offers other steps beyond diffusions. A debriefing, which usually happens a few days after the incident, includes a widened circle for others who may have been affected by the tragedy. Finally, there is a full-on intervention, which might involve an entire town after a large-scale traumatic event.
According to Van Tighem, the team usually conducts about half a dozen diffusions in town each year, and one or two debriefings.
“It’s so important to be consistent with doing diffusions on a regular basis, because even if I think it wasn’t too bad of a call, someone else might not be feeling that way,” he said.
“The biggest thing is that it affects everybody differently. So for some people a certain call might not bother them at all; other people it might be a trigger for something from their past, someone they knew or something that happened to them.”
Smith explained that because Jasper is a small town, many first responders stay with their department for a long time. After decades of responding to deaths and serious accidents it becomes tough not to drive down the road and remember something every few hundred metres.
“Over time the accumulative part of it can build up without you even noticing it, and all of a sudden one day it kind of sneaks up on you, and you realize you’re not dealing with it maybe the way you should be,” Smith said.
That’s why Van Tighem and his team take such care to protect the town’s first responders.
As Smith said: “the bottom line is it’s just looking after people. We’re all a big extended family and we’re all concerned about each other and we want to make sure that everybody’s well and healthy.”
Trevor Nichols
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