Most people who join the Canadian Armed Forces do so because they want to be of service to something bigger than themselves. Others may join for their own reasons, but they quickly learn the importance—the necessity—of the service ethos.
Innate or ingrained, that desire to help stays with veterans after they leave the military. There is an enormous pool of community-mindedness and unselfish energy among Canada’s veterans
And there is always a demand for it.
Team Rubicon Canada (TRC) is a volunteer-driven nonprofit organization that harnesses that energy to help communities that are dealing with the aftermath of disaster.
“We are a nationwide organization that spans coast to coast,” said Jim Hau, TRC’s Alberta provincial administrator.
“Right now we have approximately 4,000 volunteers in Canada,” Hau said. “We call them ‘Greyshirts.’ Specifically in Alberta we have approximately 780 volunteers.”
The term Greyshirts is a reference to the unassuming grey T-shirt the volunteers wear as a field uniform. The volunteers are military veterans as well as police, fire, and EMS personnel, both serving and retired.
A third category of volunteers, known in the organization as “kick-ass civilians,” is also welcome.
“We have a large representation from skilled citizens with the right values of serving others,” Hau said.
Team Rubicon has been called to help communities deal with the aftermath of wildfires, storms, floods and other disasters. They performed important work after the wildfires in Fort McMurray and Jasper, Alberta. They deployed to the East Coast after Hurricane Fiona, and many other situations across Canada.
They are part of an international network of similar organizations, and are occasionally called to help out in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
Derrek Williamson is a retired RCAF logistics officer living in Cold Lake. When he left the Forces, he was motivated to take on volunteer work—preferring to find a hands-on opportunity rather than a senior leadership role.
He loves working with Team Rubicon.
“It’s a lot of physical labour, but it’s not all just physical labour,” he said. “There’s training and knowledge be applied, skills that you might not have had going in.”
Williamson received training on basic chainsaw use and has since qualified as an advanced sawyer. Chainsaw work is an important part of a TRC callout, and team members aren’t just given the tool and sent out to work—training is important.
“Safety is always the premium issue with Team Rubicon,” Williamson said. “There is a long list of items that have to be checked off before you get the nod and a check in the box for your certifications.”
Hau says the volunteers’ training combines practical or online instruction with mentorship on the job. He says TRC will typically staff an operation with approximately 30 per cent first-time participants and 70 per cent experienced Greyshirts.
“This way we get a really good combination of experienced Greyshirts and new Greyshirts that have not deployed before,” Hau said.
Each team also includes the special skill sets that may be required on the scene, with a capacity for training others the related skills. For example, team members will learn safe procedures for hauling away debris after the sawyers have cut it into moveable pieces.
“These are folks that will have the right attitude and the willingness to serve,” Hau said. “They can be trained to remove debris as we cut and saw trees, for example, or they can attend some virtual training or in-person, on how to, let’s say, remove flood materials from a person’s home after a flooding event.”
“In Jasper as an example, we will train Greyshirts to go there trained in donning and doffing of PPE [Personal Protective Equipment], and techniques and tactics of going into a home to sift for mementoes.
“That includes decontamination, washing, and retrieval and removal and safe handling of the materials that we removed prior to giving it back to homeowners,” he said.
Williamson says the recovery of important personal items from the rubble of someone’s home is a satisfying part of the work.
He remembers finding a few mementoes for a family whose house was destroyed in the Jasper fire.
“You’re standing with the family looking at rubble,” he said. “There may be a few concrete basement bricks there, and very little else discernible. Mostly just grey.
“So we went in to help some people retrieve some very significant items of theirs, like the chief of police’s hat badge was in this room on a forage cap. The cap’s gone, of course, but maybe the metal was there. Or wedding rings or jewelry, that sort of thing.”
Metal and pottery would often survive.
“At the end of the work day, you would provide all this stuff to show them before you decontaminate it,” Williamson said. “We would put this stuff out for them to look at and see what they want and what they didn’t want.
“And these people that had nothing but devastation—you’re looking in this hole in the ground that was
their whole life, that’s just ash and rubble—and they’re just absolutely dumbfoundedly grateful that you came up with this stuff. You could literally put it in two hands held in front of you, and they were crying with joy because you came up with it.
“It was a real experience for sure.”
Such moments are rewarding, but for most TRC volunteers the reward is the work itself. As Hau says, it all comes back to the same thing: service.
“It is unglamorous and it can be physically demanding on Greyshirts, and that’s why they signed up,” he said.
“They’re special people in terms of their resiliency, the willingness to help someone out on their darkest days, and also the willingness to be a little bit uncomfortable.”
A deployment does indeed involve some discomfort. The days are long and exhausting. The team doesn’t stay in hotels, preferring improvised accommodations—partly for cost-efficiency, and largely to promote team cohesion.
Hau says they will sleep on cots in a school gym or in a church. Williamson remembers one deployment where everyone was quartered in the clubhouse at a golf course—relatively luxurious because although the accommodations were spartan, the kitchen was right on the premises.
As Hau says, “it’s those limitations we’re willing to endure that makes this organization special.”
Williamson says a typical day starts early in the morning. The team takes a lunch out into the field with them, and puts in a lot of heavy labour all day long.
(“I don’t know if you’ve ever lifted silt, but it’s very, very fine material, compacted and wet,” he said. “So if you can’t get air underneath that shovel, you’re not lifting anything. You feel like you’re trying to lift the entire house.”)
Then it’s back to their accommodations, clean up, briefings, and supper. And Williamson says there is usually a cold beer waiting for them at the end of their workday.
“We can sit down and relax and have a beer and get to know each other a little bit better, and then hit the hay and start over again the next day,” he said.
He said the team members get a close-up look at nature’s destructive power. He remembers clearing out a burned-out house and finding a conical pile of debris in the basement.
“So what had happened was the heat and the rapid oxidation created these cyclonic fire tornadoes that would go up into the sky and then come back down and pound the land wherever they hit,” he said.
“And this churning action, this cyclonic effect, would pull all their stuff and metals into the middle.” The suction was so strong from pulling oxygen from the side, he said, it sucked the basement wall cinder blocks into the basement itself.
“The strength of that, from fire, is incredible,” he said.
Another time he was mucking out a foot and a half of silt from a home that had been flooded. He was in the tall vaulted living room and looked up to see an inflatable exercise ball wedged into the pinnacle of the 14-foot A-frame.
The ball had floated on the rising flood waters, and been jammed into place by the pressure of the water beneath it.
“I couldn’t even believe if I didn’t see it,” he said.
Although its teams are made up of volunteers, TRC operates in sync with other disaster relief organizations and complies with professional standards.
“It’s in accordance with the Incident Command System Canada [ICS] structure that has an incident commander with an information officer, a safety officer, and a liaison officer,” Hau said.
“Then we have the general staff. These are our operations section chief, planning section chief. We have a logistics section chief, finance section chief so that we can manage our people, we can manage the task at hand, and also track the support requirements with logistics, food, medical, safety, and obviously finance to track how much we are spending,” he said.
The command structures parallel the chains of command and lines of communication that military veterans are used to working with. Specifically, they are designed to be compliant with ICS standards that other organizations use and that other team members, especially those from first responder backgrounds, are familiar with.
Hau says TRC welcomes volunteers from all walks of life—it’s not necessary to be a veteran or to have a first responder background. A desire to be of service is the top criterion.
“You just need to have the right attitude and a willingness to be uncomfortable to help someone who could be experiencing the worst day of their lives,” he said. It helps “to be okay with a little bit of chaos as well.”
Williamson said that’s the foundation of the Greyshirts’ cohesion and teamwork.
Again: service.
“They have a very regimented program to put people through, to make sure that they’re trained up to what we call the Team Rubicon safety standards,” Williamson said.
“And it’s the same thing when we leave a place we’ve occupied. It has to be better than we found it.”
Hau agrees.
“It’s values-based. We have cultural principles that we adhere to,” he said. “For me it’s about putting more jellybeans into the jar than you take out.”
