The Village of Hawarden can no longer be referred to as the little town where you locate houses by their description. Residents have now received house numbers.

Barb Martin, Village of Hawarden clerk, said the 40 occupied buildings in the village as well as the vacant lots received numbers a month ago. She said this was done after emergency personnel requested the village office institute the numerical addresses.

“The reason that we’re all having to do it is because emergency services want us to have house numbers, they want all of our little communities to have house numbers, because (without them) it just makes it impossible for them to find places,” said Martin. “You can’t just tell an ambulance come to the second house on the northwest corner of town.”

Martin said emergency personnel used to find the right house through people going out and parking at the highway, so they could lead the ambulance to the right building. She said that makes it important to have the house numbers, but it was also fun to be a bit different.

“I thought it was kind of nice and sort of quirky,” she said. “Some people had assigned themselves numbers. One street had two number 19s on it and stuff like that, which is pretty quirky. But now we have actual numerical order numbers and everybody has their own.”

To get residences their proper numbers Martin took a map of the village and put numbers on it before members of council drove around to make sure the right houses had the right numbers. She said sometimes it was a little hard to tell because there would be several lots belonging to one person, but they did their best to make sure everything is correct.

Martin said the village office then assigned residents a number and each household was responsible for putting up their own number. Despite not being different anymore, she said it is a good change for many different reasons.

“The satellite dish people and everything like that, they want a physical address and they didn’t seem to want lot and block numbers, which is why people started making themselves up numbers (before),” she said. “You also have to have a number for your driver’s licence. I personally had taken my lot and block number and just put them together (for my licence).”

The change to numerical addresses is also good because when couriers come into town they had a hard time finding the right people, said Martin.

“It’s not like the town is that huge, but still it makes it a little more difficult. Modern times intrude on all of us.”

The Heartland Health Region is in the process of trying to come up with a set of recommendations to address a serious privacy breach where an employee inappropriately viewed the personal health information of 883 patients.

Greg Cummings, CEO and president of Heartland Health Region, said an investigation into the incident is still ongoing and they do not want to jump to a conclusion before the whole analysis is completed. He said the region needs to take action to understand what happened and why it happened, so from a “root cause analysis” they can decide what actions are needed in order to prevent it from occurring again.

“It obviously indicates that there’s a weakness in our ability to audit these kinds of actions by employees in real time,” said Cummings. “We clearly need to tighten up our auditing and security measures, but the problem even with that is that we know that’s something that happens after the fact. It’s too late by the time you’ve caught somebody via an audit, so there will be other things that we will need to do to ensure that employees are well aware of their responsibilities.”

Cummings said the region’s investigation first involved a look into the affected system to see all of the people who accessed the system and the number of times a health record has been viewed. He said then through a closer examination they were able to discover whether or not the person who was looking at the information had a legitimate reason for doing so.

“A legitimate reason would be that the care provider is part of the team that is working with the particular patient and was looking at the record in order to have the right information to be able to deliver appropriate and safe care,” he said. “In this case we found that the employee looked at a lot of information that the employee had no legitimate reason to be viewing.”

The information viewed was electronic records related to the diagnostic imaging (X-rays) department and the person who viewed the information was an employee in this department at this time. Heartland Health Region’s X-rays in most of their sites are done digitally and sent electronically and employees access the information through an electronic Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS).

Personal information collected by PACS includes a patient’s name, address, phone number, date of birth, health services number as well as information about the type of diagnostic imaging exam, clinical results and the physician’s name.

Cummings said what the offence committed comes down to is “snooping” and they do not know what the employee’s motivation was. He said the region has since dealt with the employee “accordingly” for their actions.

To read more please see the November 4 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

For the past nine months a University of Saskatchewan research group has been monitoring 17 adult female moose that live in the area along Highway 11 between Dundurn and Chamberlain to try to gain a better understanding of their tendencies.

Ryan Brook, moose project director and assistant professor in the U of S College of Agriculture and Bioresources, said there has been a “few hiccups” with some of the GPS collars they put around each moose’s neck last February, but they have still been able to keep tracking those few with VHF radio signals. He said the research group also went on the ground in June and September to check on each female to see if she had calves.

“We saw in the spring there was on average 0.85 calves per cow,” said Brook. “It’s a little less than one-to-one on average, but we did see a number of twins as well and a few that had none.

“These animals can live for a long time. If they’re producing almost one calf per female then that certainly suggests a potential for real growth in the population.”

Brook said these moose are up and moving around a lot right now due to harvest activities, hunting season and the rut. He said with the moose breeding season males are paired up with females making these animals mobile and active, which is pretty consistently the time when the most moose-vehicle collisions occur.

“Because we only have adult females we don’t have a representation of the whole population and, of course, we only have a small sample of what’s there,” he said. “Some of the animals that we are monitoring have been crossing the highway quite regularly. We (have) one that is crossing almost every second day for the last little while…and is currently sitting probably about 200 metres from Hwy. 11, so that one is obviously a very risky one.

“That one is just north of Bladworth and hasn’t gone more than 300 metres away from Highway 11 in the last two weeks, so that one is a very heavy concern.”

The majority of the moose crossings happen at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. when visibility is at its lowest. Moose are also especially hard to spot from a vehicle because they have long legs, are a dark brown or chocolate brown colour and don’t always look at a vehicle so a motorist wouldn’t see their eyes.

Brook said one of the things the group is interested in looking at further is why moose are sticking around the highway. He said they think the main things are moose are attracted to road salt, there is lots of wetland, shrubbery and tree cover along the highway and staying close to the road helps them avoid hunters.

“They’re right near Hwy. 11 with all the traffic and you’re not allowed to discharge a firearm across a road or a highway, so being close to a highway may be a partial safety factor from hunters,” he said. “Predators in this general area between Saskatoon and Regina are probably not much if any wolves and very few bears, so we’re not sure if predation really plays a role here. The only predator of significance is coyotes and it’s not clear as to whether coyotes play any kind of real role or impact for moose. Predation risk may not be a real concern for these moose, but certainly hunting pressure is.”

To read more please see the October 28 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

Verna Zwarich says she is prepared to buy a cell phone.
It’s a concession the 89-year-old Hanley resident made last Tuesday, speaking from her bed at Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon. She was recovering from surgery to repair a broken hip.
A cell phone would not have spared Zwarich the operation she needed Sunday to fix her hip, but if she’d had that phone, then maybe the surgery could have occurred days earlier, preventing a four-day ordeal of hypothermia and dehydration as Zwarich lay in her farmyard northeast of Kenaston waiting for help.
“I prayed and prayed and prayed so much. It was a big help to have God on my side,” Zwarich said.
She looked and sounded surprisingly well for an elderly woman who’d spent days out in the cold without warm clothes, food and water.
She gives credit to God for her survival, however, Zwarich, who prides herself for a life of hard work, must also possess a mighty will to live. A strong stubborn streak likely didn’t hurt either.
“What an experience at my age. But I’m a strong person. I do all kinds of work on my own,” she said.
She was out at her beloved farm about 9-and-one-half miles northeast of Kenaston on Wednesday, Oct. 9, doing yard work, including putting away lawn ornaments. She was nearly finished with just two more ornaments to stash in the shed when at 2 p.m., as she was walking to her pickup truck, her right hip broke and she fell. (This injury happened to the same leg that she hurt a few years earlier when the riding lawnmower she uses to cut the grass in her farmyard fell off the bed of the truck onto her knee requiring a knee replacement.)
Her right leg useless, Zwarich said she tried to pull herself into the truck, but couldn’t reach anything to grip. As she lay near the truck, Zwarich said she watched as cars and a school bus drove by on the nearby road.
“I was waving for people to stop, but they go so fast and they don’t ever look. I was out in the open where they could see me,” she said.
She crawled to the house, but couldn’t raise herself up to open the door.
So, “I crawled over to the shed Wednesday night because I knew the door was open there. I kicked the door shut and I laid there for the rest of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.”
Zwarich said she found two “skinny little quilts” in the shed she was able to cover herself with, providing a slim bit of warmth during the frosty nights. There she laid for three nights and two days, listening to the mice scurrying about the shed all the while praying and hoping that help would come.
“I was so cold,” she said with a shudder.
Saturday it seemed her prayers were answered.
To read more please see the Oct. 21 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

Alvin Patterson would like to welcome you to his nightmare.

The Hawarden resident has reformed the abandoned Hawarden School located at the end of Main Street into a house of horrors featuring an asylum theme of maniacs, ghouls and devils. The free haunted house exhibit will be open to those not of the faint of heart Oct. 27 and 28 coinciding with the Hawarden Fall Supper held in the Hawarden Hall on the first night.

“Everyone does Christmas,” said Patterson about why he decided to build Halloween High. “The first couple years (doing this) was just sitting by my (house) letting my Rottweiler out chasing the kids. That got to be fun, (but) my Rottweiler got old. The last couple times I’ve gotten so big the people are anxious to see what I’m coming up with next. I love seeing their smiles, but the screams are better.”

Patterson said construction on his carnival of the damned began in July and he has been spending about 22 hours a week building it. He said once completed the exhibit would feature three rooms of terror and he doesn’t recommend the very young walking through it.

“I’ve actually never had any children (at my exhibits),” he said. “It’s always been adults. Three years ago some friends of ours came with their kids and this one kid wouldn’t even go (in) there. One kid disappeared. We were talking and this older couple was coming up to the fog machine. I have no idea how, but (the kid) just stood right up in front of them. I actually had to escort those two out. They were just yelling and screaming.”

It was that scare in his yard three years ago that gave Patterson the bug to take his patrons hysteria to the next level. He spends around $400 to $500 a year on Halloween props and also includes volunteers from the community into his exhibits, so they can dish out some frights too.

“Last year I had one fellow who was completely in black and people would come into the haunted house and they’d see him there (and say) ‘oh, that’s pretty realistic’,” said Patterson. “Then they’d go to the back of the tent, look at everything and they’d come out (and say) ‘where did that go’ and he was on their other side. Then their daughter was a werewolf and she was the one being hanged. People would go by her and she’d just jump out.”

Patterson said his love of sitting in his workshop creating the next monstrosity is the reason behind his dedication to frightening people and it’s paying off with more brave souls coming by each year. He said the audience has grown from 30 people getting the “crap scared out of them” three years ago to 65 receiving chills last Halloween and with the horror show falling on the same weekend as the Hawarden Fall Supper this year he expects up to 100 victims this time.

“I only open up the weekend before Halloween and it just turns out that the Fall Supper, which is a great thing for the community, (is that weekend),” he said. “I can actually open up at 1 p.m. and they can go through and then go for the supper. I think there is a gospel concert after, so they can do all three in one day. Go get scared, get fed and then repent.”