Sam Charvet owns Riverside Adventures, a Whitewater rafting company in Clearwater. But he has now launched Riverside Rescue Ltd. which has the task of providing river safety for the rebuilding in Merritt and around Hope.

Charvet says he has put together a great crew to assess hazards and keep people safe. “One of my good friends and colleagues in the Whitewater rafting industry was contacted and they forwarded the message to me about needing people right away. So I contacted the people who were looking to get water protection staff for the machine work going on and told them I could get it done.”

He says within a couple days he had guys on the Hope site and a day later had guys on the Merritt site. “There are 15 working right now covering about eight or 10 different sites at any given time making sure construction workers are getting home safe and can get Merritt and Hope and the pipeline and the highway reopened so we can get our province reopened.”

“There’s not a lot of rapids or Whitewater (where his staff are working). It is mostly considered class-1 but, there are still hazards. It is till moving water, there is still machine work going on, the banks are not stable so there is still a ton of hazards to assess. With their Whitewater background we’ve really found a lot of the best we can get out there to make sure everyone is as safe as they can be.”

One problem though, it’s having trouble moving workers around as its vehicle fleet is far from ideal. “We want to be able to cover as many of the different construction sites as possible to keep as many people safe. We have been trying to find trucks to lease or finance because we are a small tourism company we don’t have the funds to just go buy a brand new truck with cash and there is nothing in the province. There is nothing to rent.”

“We specifically need a truck that has a crew cab and has 4×4. Other than that we are not very picky. We’re looking at new because we have to finance or lease it because we can’t afford to just buy it with cash. We can go for any truck… we just need to be able to get our guys out to site. We’re trying to get two to four of them right now and depending we might need more.

Update

Shortly after this story was published Charvet provided an update saying that he has secured trucks for Riverside Rescue and thanks those who reached out.