Rescuers feel let down

When paramedics and volunteer firefighters reached Charles Douglas, they realised they couldn't pluck him off the rocks on their own. He was down by Cabin Point in East Sooke Park, "a nice place to hike, but as craggy and rugged as Charles Bronson when it comes to hauling out a guy with a broken leg". "There was no way I was walking out of there, and there was no way anybody was picking me up and just carrying me out," says Douglas, who suffered a compound fracture while rock-hopping along the water's edge. So they called in the search-and-rescue team, which tied some ropes to the stretcher and rigged some others for the volunteers to hang on to as they pulled the Victoria man 40 metres to level ground. That was in May; Douglas is getting around OK now, still uses a cane for a lot of standing or walking but can run the stairs two at a time. "The fact that there were that number of people available — local, equipped and willing to help — I was really impressed by that." That is the kind of story that wasn't told in the little legal ad that appeared in the newspaper recently, the one informing the 4,800 residents of the CRD's Juan de Fuca Electoral Area that they could, if they so wished, petition against a tax to support the search and rescue team. The levy would work out to $15 a year for an average homeowner in the Juan de Fuca area, a sprawling patchwork of rural, unincorporated lands. They alone would pay, as the <strong>30-member Juan de Fuca Search and Rescue Service — formerly Sooke Ground Search and Rescue — is on its own, having been orphaned when the village of Sooke developed its own emergency program</strong>. The tax, which would raise $63,000 a year for equipment and training, has some residents grumbling about carrying the entire cost of hunting down tourists "too brainless to find their own way back to Starbucks". Search manager Bill Meikle says that has some team members feeling downhearted.