The Calgary Fire Department had paused its in-house SCUBA dive program earlier this year as equipment upgrades were required to continue the program.

In last week’s incident at Mahogany Lake, where two young men drowned, members of the volunteer Southern Alberta Underwater Search Team provided the search and recovery services.

The bodies of the two 20-year-olds were recovered from the lake, and both were attended to by medical personnel. The victims died at the scene.

According to the Calgary Fire Department, in previous years, its own team would typically respond. CFD said in this instance, a third-party service was able to respond quickly while CFD members performed primary rescue efforts.

“Calgary Fire is required to ensure all its equipment and training are compliant with certain standards. In 2025, it paused its in-house SCUBA dive program to upgrade equipment and training to meet these standards,” the CFD said in a written statement.

“Calgary Fire has had contractors in place to provide sub-surface recovery services during the pause and anticipates its in-house dive program will return in 2026.”

Fire officials said that they still perform primary search and rescue tactics for a subsurface missing person. That includes gathering information on the victim’s last seen point, surface swims with a dive duck to try to gain a visual, the use of underwater cameras and handheld sonar scans along with aerial reconnaissance.

“If multiple surface dives (< approx. 6 metres) are unsuccessful in locating a victim, or if a victim is too deep or too heavy, recovery will need to be conducted by divers,” the Calgary Fire Department said.

Calgary fire Chief Steve Dongworth said that, for a variety of reasons, some of the equipment was out of date.

“We were struggling to keep up with the training for the size of the team. So, we’ve done a bit of a review. We’ve also found that we’re not operating to actually the latest kind of gold standard in terms of how we do public safety diving,” he said.

Need the tools to do the job: Firefighters union

Calgary Firefighters Association president Jamie Blayney said it was a tragic event that unfolded at Mahogany Lake.

He said that firefighters are experiencing all types of calls. Blayney said this particular situation highlights a handful of things.

“Rapid deployment: Every delay in getting a boat or other specialized gear onto the scene costs valuable seconds,” Blayney said.

He noted that without the right tools, firefighters must improvise, and this can put them at higher risk. Blayney also said that incidents like this can impact public confidence in knowing that their fire department can respond effectively to an emergency in any situation.

Chief Dongworth said that actual dive rescues are relatively rare.

“What remains, though, is the bulk of our work is actually surface rescue,” he said.

Dongworth also said that the first engine crew on the scene would have had a limited capacity to deal with the Mahogany Lake incident. They would have had a life vest that could have been thrown to people in distress. The volunteer dive team was called in quickly after that.

“We don’t have a stance where we have divers at every station. It’s not warranted in terms of the risk that we see. But we’ll have a program, the full dive program, again, running next year, and we continue with the surface program, which is where actually we see exponentially more work,” Dongworth said.

The Calgary Fire Department said that it is still one of the few fire services in Canada that offers an in-house dive search and recovery as a part of the front-line rescue services.

Neither the CFD nor the union could comment further on the circumstances surrounding the Mahogany Lake incident.  It’s not clear if or how a Calgary Fire Department SCUBA unit or underwater search team response impacted the timeliness of the recovery.

“The Calgary Fire Department (CFD) offers its deepest condolences to those affected and impacted by the Mahagony Lake drowning incident,” they wrote in the email response.

“Calgary Fire crews do everything within their abilities to locate and rescue missing individuals when called to a water rescue in all types of water environments. Regardless of scenario, and while ensuring firefighter safety, attempts will be made to retrieve a subsurface victim until all options are exhausted.”

The Calgary police continue to investigate the circumstances surrounding the drownings.