SAVED BY THE SKY

Amber Gomez, WRLA

When WRLA member Jack Maendel, CEO of EcoPoxy, heard that two seniors had gone missing after a countryside drive, he knew he needed to help. On June 25, Manitoba RCMP sent out a news release that an elderly couple, Brian, 88, and Evelyn Watt, 83, were reported missing from Morris after they didn’t return home from their drive the previous afternoon. Their family was scrambling for clues and desperate to find them. The clock was ticking, and the pair rely on medications they didn’t have with them. “They could be anywhere, but I thought they can’t be that far away. Having access to an aircraft, I’m one of the few people in the area who has access to an aircraft, and I knew a lot of people were looking from the ground and I just felt the need to help and assist and see if there was anything we could see from the air. Sure enough, it’s a completely different perspective up there. You see things you don’t see from the ground. We decided to give it a try,” Maendel said.

Maendel is part of the Hutterian Emergency Aquatic Response Team (HEART) started by his brothers in 2012. While people searched from the ground and near rivers, Maendel and two of his brothers and sister-in-law, who is a doctor, took to the sky to cover more ground, flying in grid patterns. After an hour and a half of flying, Maendel felt a prompt he credits to his faith in God to check St. Mary’s Road. “From a gravel road it becomes a dirt road that goes through the fields all the way down and basically it stops being a dirt road and then a tall grass path ending up in dense woods and a dead end,” Maendel said. From the air, Maendel’s sister-in-law spotted a spec of white between the trees and they circled down lower for a better look. “You can see how little we could see. It was in the woods, and there’s no way you could see it from the ground. The grass is three feet tall. Basically, we just for a few seconds saw a tiny, little thing. We thought that shouldn’t be there.” The crew circled around the site and landed so their team could investigate further by driving there. “We landed and they took off with the HEART van, which they had ready at the airport. They drove down there. We had a doctor in the vehicle ready to go. From when we found them until they drove up to the vehicle it was 30 minutes. It was very, very fast.”

The couple had been hidden deep in a wooded area surrounded by rivers. Maendel said he doubts the couple realized how desperate their situation had become. “We have little doubt that if we didn’t find them that evening, the grandpa especially wouldn’t have survived the night. That we are pretty sure of. When we found the grandpa, he was a quarter of a mile further into the woods. He had crawled there.” His wife was waiting in the car, thinking her husband would be back soon with help. Eventually that did come for them. “When we found him, he didn’t know where he was, or who he was, or who we were or what we were doing there. He had spent the night out there already. The next night, he wouldn’t have made the night. In her mind, he had gone for help and would be back any minute. They never really realized the danger they were in.”

Maendel was relieved to know the couple was safely rescued, turning a scary situation into a celebration. “Someone asked me the other day ‘what’s it like being a hero?’ Well, if I’d known it was that easy and little work to become a hero, I would have done it a long time ago. I just went and did what I love doing, which is flying. I take off with an airplane and look for somebody and don’t know if I’m going to find them or not. Somehow God let us find these people. The next day everyone calls you a hero. I didn’t do anything, I just went flying. At the end of the day, it’s using tools available to us to help search. Maybe next time it’ll be you who finds them,” he said. “These are not victims, they’re people who got recovered and we were able to talk to them. You usually can’t talk to the people you find. This was a very, very good story and a real morale booster for us that we needed and it came just at the right time.”

Left Page Bottom Left: Brian and Evelyn Watt after being rescued.

Left Page Top Right: Jack Maendel, CEO of EcoPoxy, flying his personal plane.

Bottom Centre: The white car is the vehicle that had gone missing and the red vehicle is the team on the ground who rescued the missing couple.

Right Page Middle Left: The flight path Jack Maendel took with his crew to find the missing couple.