GPS-tracked pig carcass to help RCMP find bodies in river

Where do bodies that fall in the South Saskatchewan River go?

Saskatoon RCMP believe a pig carcass will help solve that mystery.

Cpl. Tyler Hadland with the Historical Case Unit said, since the early 1980s, six bodies believed to have fallen into the river have never been found.

Cpl. Tyler Hadland, right, and another officer prepare to drop a pig carcass into the South Saskatchewan River Wednesday. “The Saskatoon Historical Case Unit has been annually searching the river by plane and by boat for the past number of years, so it’s quite a mystery as to where these bodies end up,” Hadland said.

Police dropped a pig with an attached GPS tracking device and radio transmission device into the river at the Saskatoon Canoe Club around 11 a.m. Wednesday. They hope to see how far and how quickly a body could travel in the river, and where a body would end up.

"With the GPS we’re able to access a website that will show tracking every 30 minutes, as long as it’s reaching a signal,” Hadland said.

The radio device on the pig sends out transmissions to temporary towers in place along the South Saskatchewan River to track the pig’s movements.

Hadland said understanding these movements could change how river searches and missing persons investigations are done. "As we collect more data with the flow rates on the river, we can correlate that to when we know a person went in. That could change everything.”

The research project was launched in September of 2013. RCMP dropped a pig into the North Saskatchewan River near North Battleford. The pig travelled 20 kilometers in a week’s time and ended up on a sandbar.

Police saw with the September launch that a body can travel up to six or seven kilometres per hour. Since there are many variables, such as water levels, flows and weather conditions in both the North and South Saskatchewan rivers, the RCMP plan to conduct the project a number of times.

The police said they chose Saskatoon as the next location for a launch partly because of a recent missing person case. Gregory “Myles” Macintosh went missing Feb. 1 from his stag party and his family believes he fell into the river near the Sid Buckwold Bridge.

Thursday 20 February 2014

http://saskatoon.ctvnews.ca/pig-carcass-dumped-into-river-rcmp-track-missing-bodies-potential-paths-1.1694839