SAR Statistics
Number of tasks, and people rescued
Emergency Management BC (EMBC), the provincial agency responsible for coordinating emergency response on a province wide basis, gathers statistics on all emergency incidents in BC. Weekly incident summaries are published on their web site detailing every SAR task and other emergency responses and status updates for ongoing incidents. These can be very interesting reading as they give a picture of just how often SAR groups respond, and what kind of tasks they are called to perform. There are archives of incident summaries going back to 1999.
Yearly summaries
EMBC also publishes yearly incident summaries, with year boundaries on April 1st of each year.
The following number summarize SAR incidents between April 1st 2012 and April 1st 2013:
| Ground SAR | 999 |
| Inland Water | 266 |
| SAR Air | 33 |
| SAR Ocean | 1 |
| Body Recovery | 18 |
| Evidence Search | 21 |
| Total SAR Incidents | 1338 |
National Statistics
From the SAR Volunteer Association of Canada, in Canada in 2011 there were:
- 288 GSAR Teams
- 8,978 Volunteer SAR members
- 1,933 searches conducted
- 142,270 hours spent searching
- 48,807 administrative hours
- 63,925 training hours logged by Volunteers
Plus, GSAR Volunteers presented AdventureSmart programs to 19,232 persons.
Below is the breakdown on searches and volunteers per province for 2011
| Province | Number of Teams | Number of Members | Number of Searches |
|---|---|---|---|
| Newfoundland | 27 | 811 | 125 |
| New Brunswick | 11 | 456 | 44 |
| Nova Scotia | 21 | 1,100 | 108 |
| Prince Edward Island | 1 | 91 | 2 |
| Quebec | 43 | 968 | |
| Ontario | 21 | 942 | 58 |
| Manitoba | 21 | 600 | 19 |
| Saskatchewan | 17 | 300 | 7 |
| Alberta | 36 | 873 | 90 |
| British Columbia | 84 | 2,500 | 1,304 |
| Yukon | 5 | 200 | 10 |
| North West Territories | 1 | 37 | 3 |
| Nunavut | 100 | 163 | |
| Totals | 288 | 8,978 | 1,933 |