I'm going to call the meeting to order and say, take it away. Do we need to adopt agendas and all that? Okay. I'll accept an omnibus motion to, I don't know, approve the agenda.
There you go.
Well, that's a good start.
Okay, so I heard moved and seconded is what I heard.
So, all
those and what's that?
Yeah, I thought so.
Parliamentarian, what the hell are you doing?
Okay, all those in favor?
Opposed?
None?
Carried.
All right, so it's the emergency management elected official training.
Take it away.
Thank you, Overship.
I'm just going to introduce two guests that we have in Chambers this evening.
We've got our emergency program, Andrew, Lisa Banfield.
And of course we have Chad Patrick from Logically Consulting.
He's going to be doing the presentation this evening.
Chad's supported us over several years with lots of consulting work if some of you may recognize
from the big efforts that we did last year in our wildfire scenario that we did back in June.
There's so very familiar with our region and in area and has lots of experience and emergency management prior to consulting work, worked with EMBC there as well.
So thank you, and you're all ears now. Thanks, Ted.
Thanks, Chief.
I'm just going to flip around and share my screens that you can all hopefully see what I'm presenting.
of course I can't do that before all
right so thanks for having you this this evening and I will be talking about emergency management and disaster risk management today for all of you.
Appreciate your time on this issue and the the dedication that central sandwich continues to show in this realm I would say.
Okay, so I usually start with why are we here?
I think Mother Nature helped me out today with a little bit of snow on, what are we February
26th?
Thank you for that, but really the disaster is just keep coming.
We're learning all kinds of new words like, you know, bomb cyclone and drought omega blocks
atmospheric rivers, all these things that meteorologists claim the words existed before
and they're not making up.
So we'll have to believe them, but they keep happening is really what it comes down to.
And realistically local governments have a huge role to play in disasters.
And so that's where you guys come in as the chief alluded to.
We've done a bunch of training with staff and a couple of big exercises in the last couple
of years.
And now it's your guys' turn.
As I get into this, I turn it over to you to start.
Is there anything that keeps you up in the middle of the night and I have to add now after a past presentation as it relates to emergencies?
If
you wish, certainly the unknown the the what we're not considering or what we're not
anticipating and it seems like
That's usually what hits
You know, I didn't anticipate eat don't
So much other stuff that occurs, the volume of water that washes out infrastructure may
not be an overall emergency might be for certain areas, but I think we see that.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, you know, if we look at some of the trajectories of climate change, you know, overall we're
going to get less water over the year, but what we do is give you more condensed.
And so those fallen winter seasons, we're going to have the actual rainfall during those seasons will go up.
So those types of events like the atmospheric river could go up.
I mean, as an emergency manager, I remember the beginning of the pandemic and going, okay,
like a couple of weeks, a month, we'll be over it.
I can admit that I did not see that coming how long that was going to hang around.
and wildfire on the mountain in Cleveland.
That's a big concern for a lot of folks.
Absolutely, yeah, I mean we're not without our hazards
in this area, that's for sure.
Thank you for indulging me.
So today I'm going tonight, I'm going to present
just a little bit of context and if you will,
some theory around emergency and disaster management.
I'll talk about how we structure in British Columbia
specifically so that we know how we all fit in
to the zoo and it's an emergency.
We have some new legislation that came into effect in BC
in November of last year.
So we'll talk a little bit about that.
And then some of the roles and expectations
of the policy group.
Spoiler alert, if you guys don't know,
you will usually make up the policy group
as we refer to it in emergency management
and I'll get into what that means.
So I'll spend kind of the first half of my time
talking about that.
And then I'm gonna flip it over.
I'm going to leave hopefully lots of time for questions and then get into a little bit of an exercise
Which is really just me peppering you with questions that you may get during an emergency and and it's fun for me
So with all of that said a little bit of context and again
This is a kind of a little bit of the theory of of emergency management and again, I start off with a question
Looking back to 2021 a fun year for emergencies. How many natural disasters do you think there were in
BC in 2021 and I made a multiple choice so it's either none one to five six to ten or
more than ten. Who's brave and wants to more than ten?
Anybody else?
But he said so
far
where more than ten. Anybody have a different answer than more than ten?
One to five. You just
want to be different. Got it.
So I'm going to admit I set you up a little bit. The answer really
is done. And there you go. Closer to going over, isn't that the rules? So, really, it
comes down to the fact that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. Again, I set you
up with the wording that I used. But disasters, they often follow natural hazards. And it may
seem like I'm just cutting hairs and, you know, playing with words and being, you know, funny
that way. But I think the words that we use matter, because when you frame it as a natural
disaster? It's really easy to go, oh, what can I do? It's just a natural disaster. I can't overcome
nature. Whereas the fact is, really, disasters are a result. Disasters are a result of where we build,
of where the societies we create, where we create them, the systems that we have, the disasters,
that's what makes it. A hazard into itself, you know, if it just rains and it flows off and it
it doesn't impact anything, it was just rain,
it wasn't a disaster.
This is, I mean, a conversation that's going,
been going on since the late seventies
and I think is gaining more and more traction now.
And so I leave that conversation or this idea with you
as those that may be responsible for being
spokespeople in an emergency or a disaster
to try and avoid using the term natural disaster.
It is a disaster, is a natural hazard,
but to date, nobody has been able to challenge me
for something that is a natural disaster.
We can arm wrestle after if you want to try.
So again, a framing of where we're going.
So what is disaster risk then?
There's a definition set out by UN Office
for disaster risk reduction. I'll let you read that on your own. But what I like to focus on
is really the the equation at the bottom. And if there's any engineers in the room, I apologize,
don't try and insert numbers into this equation. It's more of a you know a conceptual framework.
And it really is the interaction of these four pieces. The hazard, so the flood, the fire, the
the locusts, the pandemic, all of those things are the hazard.
But they only become a disaster in if there are vulnerabilities and if there are exposures.
So the vulnerabilities can be social, economic, all of those kind of different pieces of
vulnerability.
The exposure is, you know, if there's a tsunami, are you right on the beach or are you
at the top of the hill?
That will determine your exposure.
The flip side of all of that is the capacities.
So the capacities can be coping capacities to help you get through something if it happens
or adaptive capacities to try and, you know, make the best of it and avoid it from happening
in the first place.
So in everything that we do, we want to increase our capacities and decrease our vulnerabilities
and exposures.
For the most part, you know, unless we're talking long-range climate change and climate adaptation
efforts, there isn't really a lot we can do about the hazard itself.
I argue. So in terms of a local authority focusing on what are the vulnerabilities, the exposures,
and the capacities that we're either creating or mitigating.
Next, two theories, or I guess concepts, around compounding risk and cascading risk. And
so in the last couple of years we've seen a lot more examples of this. So the compounding
risk is really just the added of effect, where one or more hazards or disasters building
holding on top of each other make it worse than one by themselves.
The cascading is like that toppling dominoes.
One thing leads to the next, leads to the next, leads to the next.
So the example that I would give is if we have increased heat waves, we have more droughts,
we have dry lightning, we're going to have increased quantity and intensity of wildfires.
So it just sets the conditions for that next thing to happen.
So it compounds and gets bigger and worse.
I'm great news tonight, aren't I?
The toppling dominoes, I'll pick on COVID tonight.
So COVID-19 happened.
We noticed a decrease in workforce or availability of workforce.
That led to some of our supply chain issues.
That led to increased demand.
That led to inflation.
Anybody that's still on a floating mortgage,
knows that that led to increased interest rates.
Now, it's hard to draw lines straight and say COVID-19 caused increased interest rates.
But if you follow those toppling dominoes, you can see the effect that it can have.
So again, just a way of framing disasters and how we approach it and from a planning mitigation
perspective, having this in the back of your mind is, you know, you're looking at development
permit, for example.
I'm almost done with my theory, but I want to talk about the idea of systemic risks.
And I think the, you know, COVID really highlighted this concept of systemic risks, and I'll pick on supply chains, for example, you know, for all of a sudden during COVID, everybody needed a year's worth of toilet paper in, you know, a month.
And, you know, the whole supply chain system fell down. We couldn't keep up as it were.
And, you know, it just highlights when one thing, one cog in that puzzle falls apart.
the whole system can unravel. So it's really about those interconnections and with globalization
and, you know, those single points are failure that we're building towards with single suppliers,
et cetera, that it becomes a lot more fragile. And so I think this is, you know, larger than the
municipality, but the municipality has to play within the system as well. Can I jump in for
For example, here in Central Sanage, yes, there's the pandemic and how that affected everybody
all over the world.
But here in Central Sanage, when we looked at the atmospheric river in 2021, with the
Malahat having the wash out supply chain with gas.
There was shortage.
We had lineups of traffic outside the fire hall and what congestion that caused also, you
stranded in Brentwood Bay and trying to keep those residents and those people warm at
night, so going out and looking after them and trying to get them up and down the
islands. So that affected us here in Central Sandwich and nobody else within the region.
Yeah, great example, and I'll probably lean on that one again.
So that leads us right
to talking about disaster risk management and disaster risk reduction. And really, I boiled
that down to three different pieces. And, you know, if I had my magic one could inception
ideas that stay in your mind for the rest of time, it would be to think about these three
things. How do we avoid creating new risk? How do we reduce the risk that was already created
in the past? And how do we manage that risk that we can't get rid of? Because there will always
be something that happens. Unfortunately, there will always be disasters of some sort.
And that's where, you know, some of the emergency management work comes in.
But beforehand, again, that avoiding and reducing the risk, I think, is really important.
And I think the industry is really shifting to pay attention to those sides of it,
whereas before we've been really focused on picking up the pieces afterwards, if you will.
I pulled out this quote from the Global Assessment Report. It was a UN report
that gets published I believe every year. This one was from 2022 and it just reinforces that
doing more of the same isn't going to be enough. We need to change the way that we do things.
I don't think this is a revolutionary statement for anybody in the room here,
but just reinforcing from this context as well.
So in BC, we organized ourselves in a pretty
specific way.
And it's built, sorry, I've added another slide. I'll first talk about the kind of timeline of emergency management. And so on our horizontal access, we have the time. On the vertical access, we have the level of effort. So we have some bad event that happens in atmospheric river pandemic, etc, whatever it is. And we have a large surge of effort right away. And we call that the response. That's, you know, when the fire trucks roll paramedics, public works,
all of those people try and respond and alleviate the disaster.
At the same time, the municipality is trying to recover and make sure that all of your services are going to be able to continue at the same time.
Related to that is the idea of business continuity.
Very closely linked, I'm not going to get into the nuances of the difference, but really trying to return your services to operational.
The other piece that is more of that slow burn is the yellow on the bottom is the community
recovery.
Again, notice that it should start right when that event starts and it continues on
for the longest.
It can, you know, I'd say months would be short for recovery.
But realistically, you're probably in the magnitude of years in large disasters, it can be decades
for the community to fully recover and, you know, defining what that even is has become
really difficult as well. Before the event, we want to try and assess the risks. We want
to try and prepare for it. We want to try and mitigate against them. I believe you guys
have a project starting relatively soon to do a bunch of this work. Or sorry, updates,
not that you haven't done it before, update with the new context of really the world that we're
dealing with. The piece that's missing, this is traditionally what that graph looks like.
Like I like to add in prevention as a specific goal that goes right through all that timeline
that we should be trying, always trying to prevent emergencies from happening.
So with all of that said, we base our responses on something called the instant command system.
It was a system that was built out of California based on a really big wildfire that for lack
a better way of saying it went pretty poorly.
There wasn't a lot of coordination, there was a lot of response organizations, and unfortunately
there was, you know, additional people that perished in the fire and more structures
and infrastructure that was lost because of that lack of communication and coordination.
So the instant command system was meant to be able to pull people together, whether it
was a really small event or a large event.
And so that is the flexibility and the commonality of it makes it a lot easier to work and
emergency management. You know, I can walk into your emergency operation center or, you know,
Sanchez, North Sanchez Sydney, they're all the same structure. So it makes it easy to also have
staff support each other's municipalities. In British Columbia, we created another acronym
based on the instant command system called the British Columbia Emergency Management System,
B-SEMS. And what I want to pull out for you guys for that is these response schools. And from top
to bottom what it does is help prioritize decisions. When you have multiple things in front
of you and you're trying to figure out what we do, do we do this one first or that one,
this list can help you prioritize where you start even. And so it starts with the health
and safety of all responders so that we can make sure that that response continues. From
then, from there, hopefully it becomes quite obvious, you know, we want to save lives, reduce
suffering, public health, et cetera, you work your way down the list. What I do find is
Because as you get lower and lower on that list, it can become harder and harder to differentiate
and to prioritize.
I often see some of the economic and social priorities being elevated above the environmental
losses and what I would try and remind those that are involved in an emergency is that when
we lose the environment, there are economic costs of that, there are social costs of that,
they're just realized over a longer time frame.
So all of that to say, there are, this is one tool to help make decisions during an emergency.
And so when you're faced with questions from your emergency operation center going,
we need a decision from you.
You can refer back to this or ask them to provide you a copy of it so you can refer back to
it.
The other piece about the British Columbia Emergency Management System that I want to emphasize
is kind of these levels of support.
And so this pyramid is set up because the site operations, your fire police, your
evidence, public works, et cetera, they go out all the time, arguably on a daily basis
to deal with emergencies.
That's why they make up the base of this pyramid.
When they need support and help, an emergency operation center can be activated.
And so that is out of your guys' fire hall, and you have a great system set up there.
Each municipality can set up their own emergency operation center, BC Ferries, BC Hyatt,
all of those they have their own as well, and it's really supporting those on this site.
When an emergency operation center needs assistance, they can turn to the province.
And the first level of support of the province is the provincial regional emergency operation center.
I'm not expecting you to remember all of these, but if you, you know, twig it in the emergency that I was talking about these.
For us, it is the, they cover the Vancouver, whole Vancouver Island and central coast area.
They're located actually on Keating Crossroad.
There's six of them across the province.
I don't think I need to go in too much further than that, but they are a good phone
of friend.
They also will be your first line of defense for requesting resources and financial approvals
from the province.
I think so.
I mean, it's a, you know, you laugh a little bit, but the value of that is if communications
were to go down fully.
You guys are just driving down Keening Crossroad, whereas somebody on Central Coast doesn't have that opportunity.
So, I mean, it would take a lot to get to that point.
Other than that, the only other advantage that I see is the availability of staff.
For your guys' big USC exercise last year, you had a bunch of provincial staff that came and were able to support, observe and provide their inputs.
So, there are advantages, I think.
I think co-located in that same location is the Provincial Emergency Coordination Center,
PECC. They support those six pre-OX and the all the ministries in the province during
an disaster. As it means how we don't have, I would say, really any interaction with the
PECC itself, we go through the pre-OX. I think the last thing that I would say about that
That is, if we wanted to bring in the military, often that, you know, during floods, they
want to fill sandbags or things like that.
It starts at the site, oh, we need some help, then it goes to the UOC, up to the PUCC,
they go to the feds, they go down to the military, it gets approved, it goes back up, it comes
back down, and I make it sound like a really big process, but that can happen surprisingly
fast.
You know, there is a system to it, but it actually does work quite well.
Well, I would like to ask how long did it take for us to organize that for 2021?
Very long.
No, I mean, I'd say we started talking about it and I'm just going to say day one, it wasn't
the first day of the flood, but day one we started talking to the province saying, hey, we
might need this day two.
We had confirmation that basically a bunch of sailors were going to be sent to us, and
And that next morning, and I think it was a, we requested, I think, 15 or 15 people.
A full bus came with 50 ought people ready to basically be tasked with whatever we needed.
And that was the next day, and willing to come the next day and the next day.
So the calls do go out quite quickly.
I'd say with us with the naval base, if we really needed possibly that later that day.
but definitely the next day we could, we could get resources on site, I think.
And just for clarity, that was for the wash out to support Wessonic First Nations.
And we, like Chad said, we had a bus load and it was all set up in our public work chart.
Very quickly, another way to visualize that pyramid is I think of this as a button.
So in the center is that site response.
So in something bad happens, that center button gets pushed.
As you need more support, you just push harder and harder on that button and more and more of those layers get activated.
So just another way of thinking about how everybody fits into the puzzle and the pieces.
Organizationally, I'm not going to go through the whole org chart, but what I find important here is there are set structures.
You know, the org chart looks the same regardless of what organization you're in. The colors are the same so that, you know,
I know you won't remember all the colors, but on the day of, you start orienting yourself
to the colors because you may not know everybody that's in, say, the planning section or
the operations section.
So that, I find that really helpful.
What I highlight on this is that the top of that policy group, again, that's that high-level
direction.
So the policy group, in most municipalities, made up of the elected officials, sometimes senior
management involved in that as well.
And again, those are the sticky questions that the EOC either can't or doesn't feel comfortable answering that would come and get elevated to the policy group.
We'll get into some of what those questions might look like in a little bit.
This was just to highlight that expandable nature of the org chart.
Of course, you know, all these things can expand and contract as necessary.
So, you know, it's not unheard of to have an EOC that is, you know, one or two people.
On the flip side of that, there are municipal EOCs that I've seen that are 40 or 50 people.
So it can really vary depending on the event and the scope and the scale.
So the rule of elected officials during an emergency, the first piece, maintain your situational
awareness which is our jargon way of saying what's going on, why do I care and what might
happen in the future.
If you can start to answer those questions, you've built your so-called situational awareness.
You'll get that from a variety of sources, you know, whether it's the emergency program
that you'll see if it's activated, Facebook, all the social media, all the regular sources
that you get, Christina, Suspect will be contacting you and giving you updates.
You'll be getting it from multiple different sources.
You may not be getting it as fast as you want, but that's not because it's being with
held for a year, it's because it's being tried to be gathered and sourced and all that.
A men-to-creature of our policies, again, some of those sticky questions that may come
up, declaring a state of local emergency.
I'm going to spend a bunch of time in a little bit here on what that is and when it might
be recommended, you may find yourselves being requested to be a public media spokesperson
with a camera in your face, you know, on the radio, a microphone, whatever that looks
like being the face and the voice of the municipality.
The other piece that I add into there is the acknowledging contributions, yes, hopefully
during the event, but especially afterwards.
There are a number of staff that get pulled in and perform extraordinary feats well beyond
what I think the job descriptions are.
As well, there are a number of volunteer groups that are under the auspices of the municipality,
You know, our emergency support services and communications and search and rescue and I think I got them all
That that helpers want as well
So just making sure that they're recognized afterwards and you know coming from the elected officials especially
I'm going to take a quick break to let you pepper me with questions, which is really my chance to grab some water
Sure
I guess my question is in relation to before the emergency takes place, before the disaster.
And I've talked with our director planning before about forecasting.
We're required to do some forecasting regarding housing in the district by, I believe January 1st of next year.
How do we appropriate, how could we build in forecasting and future growth that is resilient and adoptable to various scenarios and such that we might see.
Not suggesting we can tell everything about the climate but from what you know, from the Pacific Climate Institute, from others in terms of the
frequencies, potential frequencies of disasters with, you know, yeah, I mean, I think this
is, this is one of the challenges right now. And it gets back to that slide that I talk
about uncertainty is, you know, before we used to be able to look backwards with relative
confidence of what happened is what will happen. And we know that that isn't as effective
anymore. Having said that, there are lots of forecasts and climate models that are available
that can start to look at, you know, what our precipitation, our temperatures are, you know,
all of those different climatic pieces, and what might that look like?
And, you know, I think what your question is getting at is, as a municipality, how do
you add that to the work that you're doing?
Right.
And I think it highlights the fact that climate change, emergency management, planning, development,
All those things, the part of a multi-sided coin or dice, if you will, that they can't
be done in isolation.
So, you know, those conversations need to involve multiple different departments.
And I think the work on disaster risk reduction that is upcoming for the municipality is targeting
looking at and identifying what are the risks both now but into the future as well.
So I think that then gets fed into the different processes of...
Approval processes and work that's being done. You know, I, again, I am impressed with, with the district, you know, with what you guys do with Merne's management. You have a dedicated climate planner. Specialist, I can't remember the title. You have all these pieces that are feeding in. And it's just making sure that those connections are being made from what I'm seeing. You guys are doing well with making the connections, and it's being purposeful.
and deliberate in incorporating those into the work that happens.
Yeah, what I would love to see given that we have to do a housing needs assessment,
is for there to be some scenarios built in of worst case scenario to best case scenario,
maybe an in between in terms of the potential impact of future growth.
And how that question about climate and
And such needs to be considered in light of that.
Yeah, I mean, I think the growth in terms of the types of buildings we're building and how we're building them.
I think step code is a start to that, but probably not keeping pace with climate change.
But then also the development itself, where are we building and what are we taking away, how are we protecting the green space?
That we know provides shelter, if you will, literal and figurative from climate change.
So yeah, I agree with you, and I mean, I think some of that work is upcoming through the emergency program, and hopefully we'll filter out through the different departments.
Anything else before I move on? Definitely got my water. Oh, yeah.
Sure. Thank you. And, you know, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I'm sure on this sort of topic.
I guess, first to staff and the work that was done with the last significant exercise that was done around the West Side, around Mount Newton.
Climate and emergencies and these types of events don't hold on to boundaries for local governments by any stretch of the imagination.
So I guess how much of this coordination is also done not just the you know the resources at the districts level but the resources from the you know the policy groups locally so that we are you know pulling in the same direction so to speak that we're having consistent decision making processes to move forward on this there's you know I had a really interesting conversation with.
with CAO, West Bank recently and the decisions that were required of him through the policy
group and how do you, you know, how do you train or what sort of education is provided
for, I guess, the elected officials to, you know, how do you value side A of the street
versus side B of the street when you're having to make some of these challenging decisions.
Yeah, a couple, I mean, do you want to talk about RIMP and the-
It's a lot there, I can appreciate.
Yeah, no, a few pieces.
So, I mean, in terms of regional coordination, there are a few mechanisms in place.
So there's the regional emergency management partnership, which is the 13 municipalities
and the CRD coming together, co-funded, raised, organized by the CRD in the province
on behalf of you all of the 13, to do regional emergency planning.
One of their projects is the regional concept of operations, I believe they call it, which
brings together the CAOs in time of crisis to help make some of those larger decisions.
So there is that piece of it, and I guess that answers one line of your questioning.
I mean, the other piece in terms of how do you prepare elected officials in the policy
group?
You know, to me, my hope is that this is the first of many for you all and that you find
value in engaging in this conversation and want more training because there are, you know,
as you say, West Bank, you know, how do you prioritize if we knock down these 10 houses
we may protect the rest of West Clonar, whatever the numbers are.
They're not generally easy questions that come and how do you prepare yourself for that?
If I could just add to that through the mirror.
I think that this is preparation just being at a council meeting.
You're preparing every day because you have to make decisions with information that's
provided to you.
That's what would happen during an emergency as well.
We would provide you with the best information we could and then decisions would have to
be made.
It's difficult when you're in an emergency situation because you have to make decisions
that it's almost impossible for us to be able to prepare you for every decision, but
it would be about staff providing you with the information and then you being provided
with that decision.
I mean, yeah, I don't think we'll ever be able to train you, you know, for anything that's
going to come up, but so it's just going to be, but you make difficult decisions every day
I guess is what I'm saying Councillor.
Along that line's following up, the integration and coordination with the, you know,
the five local First Nations around here as well and how they're included and incorporated
into some of this because they would probably fall potentially outside of that CRD emergency
coordination, I would assume.
I'm just going to jump in, sorry, for Chad here and say that under the new act, which I think
you're going to speak to in a minute, there is a requirement to work with the local First
nations and we did receive a grant of $48,000 to work with our two local First Nations
on emergency planning and so that grant is basically for the next calendar year to meet
the requirements of the act. I will say that the district was already doing that and
incorporates an emergency coordination and planning function into the fire services agreement
with the First Nations, the one that's currently under negotiation.
Exactly.
I was going to say perfect.
Good job.
I didn't have to do it.
But yeah, I mean, you guys already have some pretty great relationships with the First
Nations.
At least from the emergency management side is from what I see.
And I think that will lend itself well to those conversations moving forward and these new
requirements that have now come into effect for local authorities through the new act.
which is a great segue into the legislation.
So I'm just going to plow through this a little bit.
So really there is the Emergency and Disaster Management Act
affectionately known as Edma now.
There will be new regulations coming.
They are not in place yet.
They're still being developed and anticipated.
I'm just going to say this year.
Yeah,
we'll leave it there. There's also the other associated legislation just because
it's emergency doesn't mean everything else just gets thrown out. I've seen, you know,
the Fire Services Act, please act, you know, all these different acts get pulled into emergencies
in one way or another. That doesn't mean, you know, just because there's an emergency doesn't
mean that we get to ignore everything else. So, you know, those are all the kind of provincial
pieces of legislation. And, of course, all your bylaws still exist as well. So, we can
lean on multiple different legislative mechanisms and often there are emergencies that fall between
the cracks of legislation that maybe legislation hasn't caught up to yet.
The new Water Sustainability Act was a great improvement over the Old Water Act, where there
was a lot of emergencies that kind of fell through the cracks, so that's kind of the brief overview.
you. In terms of the act itself, you know, I pulled out a few pieces just around some
of the municipal requirements. You are required now. You kind of always were, but it was
more hidden. But you're required to complete and maintain a risk assessment. That is
work that is upcoming. Emergency plan or plans and the business continuity plans make sure
that you can continue doing the great work that you guys do. In terms of the risk assessment,
The words that they use as you must identify are reasonably foreseeable hazards.
We're not entirely sure how they're defining that yet, but you've got to look at the likelihood, the scope, the scale, basically what could go wrong here.
You have to look at some of the potential consequences to not just people but the property, to livestock, to animals, to places of heritage value.
consider who are the vulnerable populations and people in your community and how
might they be impacted. The emergency plans have to look at what are the
necessary measures needed, whose got responsibilities in that plan, they want
people either personally named or by position. I suspect that it'll almost always be
by position for all the reasons. Start looking at what are the resources required
As part of our emergency plan, the procedures, it does ask you to put together a training and exercise program so that you have that ongoing reminders and building that muscle memory.
It asks you to come up with and identify what are the mitigated actions and promote cultural safety.
And this is the first piece of that requirement to engage with First Nations.
If you evacuate people, you have to be able to provide care for them and their animals,
whether that is domesticated or livestock, which is new, the livestock side of it.
And you must consult with and engage with indigenous governing bodies for each nation that
has traditional territory in your area.
So that may extend beyond the two reserves that you normally deal with.
I just wanted, if I could add to that, Chad?
Yeah.
Just for council's information, this is the first legislation that has incorporated
dripper into it, so I think it's something that we can look as a foreshadowing to any
new legislation and what responsibilities the municipality will have under dripper.
Yeah, absolutely, and it was legislation that was co-developed with First Nations as well.
So yeah, that's a great point.
The business continuity plan really, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, it's
really the measures to ensure the continuity of your services.
Again, I pull out this requirement to consult, coordinate, and cooperate with First Nations.
And this is through all phases for your risk assessment, for your planning, during your response,
during your recovery at all points, walking in lockstep with the nations that are around.
The other thing that it does is it creates the opportunity to create what they're calling
multigerstictional emergency management organizations.
Let me create with acronyms, M-J-E-M-O, it just rolls off the tongue.
And this is for either all of your legislative responsibilities under Edma or you can specify
which ones.
And so you can partner with, you know, in your guys' case, one or more of the local authorities
on the peninsula or one or more of the First Nations and you can create a single kind of
emergency management organization, so that is a new opportunity within the new legislation.
I think this is one of my last ones on the legislation and really it creates, just as the last act did,
the ability for extra ordinary powers and will get into the state of local emergency.
I just note there there is also the provincial state of emergency that basically provides access to superpowers if you will and
will get into what those powers are.
In short, it speaks directly to all of those phases
of emergency management, right from preparedness
and understanding through to recovery,
clarifies roles.
We need to work with the First Nations around us,
provides for different kinds of shared programs
and agreements that I just mentioned.
It does also add specific requirements
for the first time for critical infrastructure owners.
So, you know, this is transportation,
power, natural gas, or fossil gas, transportation, et cetera.
All of those operators now have requirements under Edmuth,
a new emergency management act to perform many of the same tasks
that you are being asked to perform.
It does also add in enforcement and compliance sections.
Some people are getting really edgy about this one.
It's really just in line with pretty much every other piece of legislation.
It just was, didn't really have any teeth in the old one, so I wouldn't get too worried about this.
I don't think the province wants to come in and do any of that, if they don't have to.
Who, state of local emergency? What is it? Again, it is that ability to access additional powers.
That is the only time that you ever need to declare state of local emergency is to access one or more of those powers.
It has nothing to do with finances or anything else that you can think of.
There are, there is a lot of confusion often around the state of local emergency in part
because in the U.S., states of emergency are tied to funding for us.
We have access to exactly the same amount of money in the same ways with or without a state
of local emergency.
I'll say it one more time, the only reason to ever declare state of emergency is to access
one or more of those powers.
So what are those powers?
I'm going to tease you and do one more slide before I get into that.
The two mechanisms that you can declare stable local emergency are by order.
The mayor's designate can do it by order or by by law.
I've never seen it done by by law unless it's been, you know, an emergency that's been going
on for a long time for obvious reasons of timeliness.
So it's usually done by order, but declaration, there are certain things that need to be included
in it, you know, the nature is that a flood is that a fire, the geography, all those kind
of things needs a date and an expiry date.
In the new legislation, you can now declare state of local emergency for 14 days.
It used to be seven.
So every 14 days, you either have to renew that state of local emergency, rescind it, or it
will automatically expire.
So anytime you're being asked to sign a state local emergency
Set yourself a nice little calendar reminder for 13 days from then to make sure that that doesn't expire.
Yeah. The American declare it. Yeah. Many lots for 14 days. Yeah. Does the mayor renew it? There is. So two things. The American can declare kind of unilaterally. There is a requirement to notify and keep the rest of council apprised in timely manner. I can't remember the words that they use, but they can't just
Let's go do it and then not tell the rest of council.
The renewal of legislation actually says something of, they must, at the earliest convenience, convene council in order to, there's the words that's exactly it.
Yeah, good work.
And they can also, they can also renew unilaterally as well.
So, I mean, the preference is that all of counsel is included.
The preference is that it's done by by law, but the reality is that it's often done by order.
And often, even if it's just the mayor that's signing, mayor, or
designate, that it is done with the knowledge and consent of the rest of counsel,
even if it's not official.
I'm going to go through a few of the powers of the state of local emergency.
It used to be like nine bullet points in the old act.
It's now I think three or four pages, so it's more clear, we'll go with that.
So you can identify supplies, equipment, services and properties as essential.
The reason you might want to do that is because you can then control the prices or rents of
those items.
If we, it's really, the best example is cost-scouging, an emergency happens and all of a sudden it's
The heat event and the price of ice goes through the roof.
You could set the price of ice, for example.
The rationing providing for distribution, that example of the roads washing out and the
gas supply chains, and there's a while there where we can only fill up so many leaders in
each filling, things like that.
That was put in place through a provincial state of emergency, and they were able to ration.
And that's the mechanism that said, you know, gas station,
you can only sell so much per customer.
So that's one mechanism.
You can also provide for the restoration
of essential services.
You can also authorize or acquire a person to provide services
and to which they are trained for.
This is despite any contract or collective agreement
that is already in place.
That is new language and the new act.
So, you know, you...
I'm not going to try and put an example to that one.
The authorize I understand the require I have a harder time with.
I'm not going to go behind somebody and make their arms move, but you have that ability.
In terms of land and property, you can appropriate use, control any property or land.
You can enter it without warrant, you can prohibit entry, you can alter it, you can build things, you can demolish things.
You can essentially almost do whatever you want.
And as it relates to the emergency, this isn't the, like, we have a problem, you know, property that we've been trying to deal with for years, and now we've got emergency grade, you have to be able to justify that it's related to the emergency.
So all of these powers, as you're probably starting to see, suspend civil liberties or other legislation in some way.
That's why they are very powerful, and that's why they want every 14 days to renew it.
We still need these powers.
If so, great, we can renew it, but it's forcing you to ask the question of what you still
need that state of local emergency for.
In terms of evacuations, you can require somebody to leave, whether it's individuals or animals,
you can remove people and personal property, but you have to provide for the care of those
people and animals.
Related to that, controlling a prohibit travel, carrying on a business type of business, event
or type of business and limits, so even if somebody is licensed permitted or otherwise authorized
to do something, you can basically pull that back and say no, there's a wildfire in the area,
there's a flood, there's a whatever's going on, you are no longer allowed to do that despite
what has been told to you in the past.
So all very powerful pieces of those extraordinary
special powers under state of local emergency, so that's why it's not entered into lightly,
And, you know, we need to go back everyone's in a while and make sure that we still need those powers.
I'm going to plow through in to try and make sure that I get to the end and still leave some time.
One of the last things that I want to say is really it's my plug, my time to go in my soapbox.
Are you ready?
Being personally prepared to make sure that your families are ready.
Because if you're asked to respond in emergency and your head's still at home trying to figure out
if your loved ones are cared for and safe, you're not going to be very effective in an emergency.
So having a kit together, having a plan together with your loved ones to be able to care.
The current recommendation in the CRD is seven days. The province and the feds are still
48 out, no 72 hours. I would extend that to two weeks or more personally, and really if you start
are looking at the news footage of a major emergency after seven days, after 14 days.
Does it really look that different?
You know, if you can roll the dice, but it doesn't take that much to put on emergency
kit together, so I do encourage you to do that.
There you go.
I'm going to stop there in terms of questions.
I'd love to do a little bit of an exercise where I just poke you with some policy
questions if you'll entertain me to do that.
But before I do, I just wanted to give you guys all a chance to pepper me with questions.
I was going to say that Chad had prepared a workshop for Council.
So if Council so wishes, we could bring him back to do that.
We do have a seven o'clock start for a regular Council meeting.
But I think he's open to questions now.
Rea Kitt, who could help us ensure that we have the appropriate kit?
Do you want to talk to that?
We can't.
Absolutely, I do work if you want to.
We might think we do, but we may not have.
And we're some nearest cooling center
in the community for people in a middle of a heat wave.
So currently right now we have the Cultural Center in Brentwood,
as a designated cooling center.
And in central, or in Sandwichton,
we have Sandwich Baptist Church across from Centennial Park,
and the Masonic Hall.
Great. Thank you.
Do we also need to plan for displaced people from elsewhere when the fires were occurring?
And so is would that be considered a crisis here if people are needing to relocate?
And, you know what I mean, where are we going to provide lodging and housing if people are displaced?
So through our ESS team, emergency support services, on the peninsula we do have designated
reception centers and group lodging areas with all the equipment.
So they are designated and how that would work as we would send somebody out.
We don't broadcast where those are because we don't want the public to just go there in case
that building is not standing and then all of a sudden we have 20, 30, 40 people waiting
to get in there and try and sleep or whatever.
So what we'll do through the EOC is we'll set a team out and they'll kind of go and do a rapid damage assessment.
Make sure that that building is still standing and safe and then we would broadcast that throughout the municipality on where to go.
The last piece that I'll add to that is just the emergency support services is another one of those provincially kind of coordinated programs.
So, the sending, you know, and the receiving municipality would both have teams that can work together very well.
And so, it is a system that, you know, when we see those big wildfires, you know, we have had people show up on the island, you know,
either announced or unannounced that we knew or didn't know that they're coming and say, I need help.
And that is something that's pretty well, well-oiled machine, I'd say.
Okay.
Yeah, it is, and we have agreements in place with motels, hotels all over the region to
be able to do that.
Thank you.
Just regarding the local state of emergency, has there been an example where one was issued
and the province deemed that it was not necessary or was not required and sort of stepped into
the SERP control again?
I can't think of an example.
They have the ability, too, under the legislation, but I can't think of an example where that's happened.
I'd say if anything, it's the opposite.
There are times where there have been times that I've known municipalities to maybe not be moving as fast as the province wants.
And to, you know, have conversations and suggest that maybe a state of local emergency would be in order and here's why, but it generally starts with that soft touch of reaching out and having that conversation.
to say, hey, what do you know that we don't know kind of thing?
But they do have that ability.
Any other questions?
I will probably leave it there.
I do have, like, say a workshop.
I can come back at any point.
And we can, I can have more fun that way.
Thank you, everyone, for your time.
Thank you, Chad.
Thank you for the presentation.
OK.
Well,
yeah.
Are we scheduled to start at seven?
So we'll be back in five minutes.