Community fundraising for families of 2 girls who died in N.S. boating accident

Fundraising efforts are underway for families of two kids who died in a boating incident on Saturday.

Flags are at half-mast at two schools in Fall River, N.S., following the tragic drowning deaths of two girls, both under the age of 10, on Saturday.

“This is not a criminal investigation, this was a search and rescue effort. We are making attempts to locate the boat, the flat-bottom canoe with a motor, whether that is still even afloat it’s hard to say because they did take on water, the boat did overturn,” says Const. Mandy Edwards with the RCMP.

A 45-year-old man and three children were out on Lake Rossignol near West Caledonia on Saturday when conditions worsened on the lake. The boat overturned after taking on water.

RCMP said the lake is quite large and the worsening conditions made it challenging for rescue crews.

“The conditions had deteriorated since the man and the children had gone out. With the drought this summer, all lake levels are low so that meant a lot of exposed rock which hindered those boating efforts to get to their location,” says Edwards.

The man performed life-saving measures on two of the children while the other child remained on the phone with 911 to help direct them to their location.

“They did make it to shore and the search and rescue helicopter was able to land and then the search and rescue techs that were on that helicopter took over the life-saving measures for those children. Everyone was loaded into the helicopter and transported to hospital,” says Edwards.

Fundraising efforts have been set up to support the families.

Social media identified the two girls as Lucy Cable-Munroe and Adalind Gaul.

Registered counselling therapist Tara Field says it can be difficult to explain tragedies like this to younger children.

“We don’t really get a grasp of death, it’s final until we are five or six years old. So children younger than that, they may repeat things and say, ‘I can’t wait to see this person again and this person’s gonna come pick me up and I am going to this person’s house’ and a lot of it’s imaginary and that’s OK. We don’t need to correct them because eventually they will be able to process,” says Field.

Field advises parents and educators to use concrete language with children and not to use language like “passed away” or “gone to a better place.”

She explains that telling kids someone died helps them to understand reality.

Field notes deaths like these can bring up memories of past losses and it’s important to support one another.

“What I tell people is it’s never too late to grieve. It might be now, in three or six months or two years because grief comes in waves and we can’t control it and there is no timeline,” she says.

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