Family and friends of slaying victims Marcedes Myran and Morgan Harris plan to be on the team that searches the Prairie Green Landfill for their remains.
Melissa Robinson, a cousin of Harris, will be on the search oversight committee while her husband, George Robinson, will supervise workers. Cambria Harris, daughter of Morgan, will also be on the oversight committee.
“We don’t want just anyone doing it… someone who is just trying to collect a paycheque,” George Robinson said Thursday.
Premier Wab Kinew and project lead Amna Mackin, a provincial civil servant, said at least 12 searchers per assembly line will conduct the manual search each day.
Ruth Bonneville / Free Press file
Family and friends of slaying victims Marcedes Myran and Morgan Harris plan to be on the team that searches the Prairie Green Landfill for their remains.
The number of assembly lines that are needed will depend on shift schedules and other details to be worked out during the pilot search at a different part of the landfill, northwest of Winnipeg, Mackin said.
“Generally speaking, the more searches you have, the quicker the search can proceed. But of course, that needs to be balanced with the productivity for the excavation rate at the cell hauling to the search facility itself and the ability to spread that waste,” she said at a news conference Thursday.
Searchers would ideally have experience in human anatomy, but anyone is welcome to apply to be part of the search crew, Mackin said.
“We’ll be putting out likely a call to see who might be interested in participating. Those individuals would go through a recruitment process,” she said.
JESSICA LEE / FREE PRESS file
Melissa Robinson (centre), cousin of Morgan Harris whose remains are believed to be at Prairie Green Landfill, will be on the search oversight committee.
Members of the First Nation Indigenous Warriors, a community watchdog group whose members have demanded Prairie Green be searched, have said they would like to aid in the search.
“It needs to be First Nation-led if they’re going to be looking for our loved one,” Melissa said.
Qualified individuals will be trained to manually search through more than four football fields worth of waste and toxic material.
Recruitment will take place between late summer and early fall, Mackin said.
Searchers will be trained to look through the raw material for anything of interest, including receipts with a May 16, 2022 date — the day Harris and Myran’s remains were believed to be taken away — or take-out containers with businesses that would have been on the garbage truck’s route.
Workers will use rakes or other tools to spread material and open bags, and then look for human remains, Mackin said.
Kinew has said that a manual search, rather than one that uses a conveyor belt, offers the best chance of finding the remains and people hired for the job will receive extensive training.
The former Tory government rejected the idea of a wide-scale search, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, citing worker safety due to the landfill containing asbestos, among other harmful material.
A feasibility study said while the search is possible, exposure to asbestos and other chemicals could put workers in harm’s way, though the safety risks could be mitigated if addressed properly.
The technical committee is finalizing its exposure-control plan, which will help address safety concerns, the premier said.
George Robinson, who is actively involved in ground searches for missing people, says workers should be just as wary of their mental health as potential physical health hazards during the search.
“We observe a lot of awful things,” he said.
Cadaver dogs could also be used, Mackin said. Cadaver dogs are being used to search a Saskatoon landfill for the remains of 22-year-old Mackenzie Trottier, who went missing more than three years ago.
nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca
Nicole Buffie
Multimedia producer
Nicole Buffie is a multimedia producer who reports for the Free Press city desk. Born and bred in Winnipeg, Nicole graduated from Red River College’s Creative Communications program in 2020 and worked as a reporter throughout Manitoba before joining the Free Press newsroom in 2023. Read more about Nicole.
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