False Creek Ferries worried about rescues with Kits closed

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VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Those cute little ferries that ply the waters of False Creek and English Bay could now be Vancouver’s first line of defense in the case of a marine emergency in a very busy waterway.

Since the federal government locked the doors of the Kitsilano Coast Guard station last week, the companies that run the boats, False Creek Ferries and Aquabus, are now worried they have more  responsibility when they are involved in a rescue.

“I would suggest that with the two ferry companies down here it’s more often than you think. It’s probably once a month, on average,” says Dave Giles, a skipper with False Creek Ferries.

“We are not really trained professionals to deal with people who have jumped off a bridge into the water, so that puts those people in a very difficult situation as well as ourselves.”

There are 10 to 20 of the little foot passenger ferries on the water at any time during the day. “We are constantly going underneath the bridges so that’s why we tend to be first on the scene,” he tells News1130.

“What you can do is immediately call the Coast Guard and from [the Kits] station it was one minute away. You could help the person in the water, get a hold of them, maybe bring them up onto the step of the boat and by then you’re passing them off to the Coast Guard,” explains Giles.

“With the Coast Guard now 25 minutes away, now I suppose we’ll have to call an ambulance. With one [operator] on the boat it is very difficult to get a bigger person into the boat. We could be holding onto those people for 25 or 30 minutes beside the boat. When you first get to these people they are still alive, but they don’t have that long.”

Ottawa quietly closed the base on February 18th, which will save the feds $700,000 a year.

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