DRUM HEAD — Local search and rescue volunteer Judy Burke doesn’t talk about heroics. She talks about who hasn’t eaten yet.
She talks about people who won’t sit down, even when they should. About people who don’t know where they’re sleeping that night. She talks about making sure there’s water on the table, chairs where they’re needed, a cot ready before someone realizes they’re too tired to ask.
And she talks about being there – wherever “there” is – whenever she’s needed.
Last summer, when wildfires forced thousands of people from their homes in northern Manitoba, Burke was there. She wasn’t fighting flames or piloting aircraft. She was in a Winnipeg convention centre, helping set up and dismantle thousands of makeshift beds, watching for signs of exhaustion, and quietly keeping track of the human details that make large emergencies survivable.
A week later – after three days’ respite at home – she was in Newfoundland, standing at roadblocks near evacuated communities, calmly turning people away from towns they were desperate to reach. Sometimes they were angry. Sometimes they came back later with trays of doughnuts. People are tired, Burke says. Why wouldn’t you try to make it easier? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?
Burke is 69 years old. She lives in the house where she was born – in Drum Head, in the Municipality of the District of Guysborough, facing the ocean. A former member of the Canadian military and a widow, for the past decade she’s been a volunteer counsellor with the Search and Rescue Volunteer Association of Canada (SARVAC), based in Monastery as part of the Strait Area Ground Search and Rescue team.
She describes this work as peer support for the teams responding to disasters – the people who go looking for the lost, fight fires, manage evacuations and, at times, recover the dead. “I don’t go in the woods anymore,” she says explaining that a bad knee has changed her role. “If I got hurt, my team would have to stop and bring me out.”
And that would never do, she says. “You stay a team.”
It’s a simple statement that explains almost everything about her.
A life shaped by service
In a way, it was a team she was looking for in the mid-1970s when she walked into a naval recruiting office in Halifax. Her father, a mechanic, and her mother, a homemaker, had moved the family – herself, three older sisters and an older brother – to the city years earlier for work, leaving her to come of age in a place where ships in the harbour and uniforms on the street made service feel like part of the landscape.
“By the time I was 18,” she laughs, “I was in uniform.”
She joined what was then the unified Canadian Armed Forces and spent her entire career in Navy postings. Her first was Haida Gwaii, off the coast of British Columbia. Others followed: six months at Alert, in the High Arctic north of Ellesmere Island; eight months in the former Yugoslavia during the war there in the early 1990s; and postings across Canada. She reached the rank of master seaman.
In 1995, she and her husband – also a veteran – retired from the military in Winnipeg. Eventually, they returned to Drum Head and built their home on the stone bones of the old family house. “I came back to where I was literally born,” she says.
After leaving the armed forces, Burke took a civilian job at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, working in the registrar’s office for 12 years. It was steady, institutional work – the kind that demands patience, accuracy and calm problem-solving. Useful work.
She and her husband had always planned to join their local ground search and rescue team together after retirement. When he died in 2015, she recalls asking herself, “Well, what’s stopping me?”
She went down to find out what it was about.
She’s been there ever since.
Up in flames
Ground search and rescue is, by design, largely invisible. But that wasn’t how it felt last summer.
As wildfires spread across parts of Manitoba, entire communities were forced to evacuate – many of them Indigenous communities suddenly displaced and moved hundreds of kilometres south to Winnipeg. Reception centres were opened. Cots were assembled by the thousands. Volunteers were mobilized from across the country.
Within that system, a quieter call went out. The Search and Rescue Volunteer Association of Canada began assembling national humanitarian task forces – teams drawn from local search and rescue organizations, selected for training, availability and experience. Counsellors trained in Critical Incident Stress Management were part of that mix, though the work, Burke says, quickly became hands-on operations.
She arrived in Winnipeg to find a city absorbing thousands of evacuees, many uncertain when – or if – they would be able to return home. She was assigned to a team working out of a convention centre, where evacuees were registered, housed and supported in coordination with the Red Cross and local agencies.
She helped where help was needed – setting up and dismantling cots and tables, keeping the operation moving. And she watched over the people doing the emergency work, itself, her peers. “I was keeping an eye on them,” she says. “Making sure they weren’t overworking, that they were eating on time. It was very hot out there. Making sure they had proper water.”
For the evacuees themselves, she says, the shock of the new often ran as deep as the alarm from dislocation. “Some had never been in a city. Some had never flown before. Some had never seen a building over two stories high. They didn’t know if they had a home to go back to.”
After a week in Manitoba, Burke was home for only three days – long enough to unpack, long enough to wash clothes, long enough to reset, briefly, to the rhythms of Drum Head – before the system moved again. This time, the call came from the east.
Wildfires in Newfoundland and Labrador had forced evacuations and cut off access to entire communities. Roads were closed. Checkpoints were established. Local search and rescue teams were stretched thin. Once again, SARVAC began assembling a national response. Once again, Burke was on a plane.
The work in Newfoundland was different from Manitoba, she says, but no less demanding. Instead of evacuees arriving in unfamiliar cities, the task here was containment – preventing people from returning to towns that had been evacuated, sometimes with little warning and no clear timeline for return.
She worked 12-hour shifts, choosing again to stay operational rather than step back into a purely counselling role. As in Manitoba, she watched the people around her as closely as the situation itself. The work compressed quickly. “You’re with these people you’ve never known before for a week,” she said. “And by Day 2, you’re so close.”
Ordinary work
Looking back now, Burke doesn’t frame any of this as sacrifice. She talks instead about teams. About preparation. About being ready when the call comes – and knowing when it’s time to step back, and when to quietly surge forward.
For those who know her well, this is pure Judy.
Janet Stark, who worked with Burke for years at StFX and lives in Antigonish, says her friend has spent her life in roles that involve service, often without recognition. “When I think of Judy, I think of somebody who has given a lifetime of service in every position she’s been in, and she’s been an unsung hero.”
During her military service, Stark noted, Burke was posted to dangerous places overseas, including during the war in Bosnia. But she has never treated those experiences as something that set her apart. That pattern, she insists, carries through life at home.
“They serve a Christmas dinner to maybe 75 people,” Stark says of a particular community event in Goldboro. “Well, you know Judy is going to cook four turkeys and bring them in. That’s just the way she is.”
Back in Drum Head, Burke, is more inclined to talk about what comes next than what has already passed. “There’s always something you can do,” she says. “You just have to know what it is.”
Part of that work now involves prevention. Through AdventureSmart, a national outdoor safety program, Burke spends time with local children and youth, talking about planning, weather and the small decisions that keep people from getting lost or hurt in the first place.
It is, in its own way, the same work she does in a convention centre or at a roadblock: helping people think ahead, notice details and stay safe.
When the call comes, she says, she’s ready. She fills out the form. She packs her bag. She gets on the plane.
And when the work is done, she comes home to Drum Head – to the place she was born – and waits, quietly, for whatever comes next.
