Season 1, Episode 5: Emergency Preparedness
In this episode of The Gravity Well you hear the importance of community, leadership, and emergency response. Hosts Alex and Jenny, along with guests Mike Westwick and Chris Yeremiy, discuss the significance of mentorship, pre-planning, and effective communication in managing crises. You hear emphasize the need for a structured incident command system, the value of honesty and empathy in public communications, and the importance of training and retaining skilled emergency responders. The conversation also highlights the challenges posed by natural disasters, such as wildfires and water shortages, and the critical role of community engagement and preparedness in mitigating these emergencies. Like and subscribe! Hosted by Jenny Yeremiy, The Gravity Well delves into complex issues to foster understanding and improve the world, from Treaty Seven and Southern Alberta, in Canada.
Background information: the Northwest Territories had a historic wildfire season in 2023. “On June 7, there were eleven active wildfires in the Northwest Territories. At that point, there had been 21 total fires had affected 403,815 hectares (997,850 acres). By August 15, there were over 230 wildfires throughout the territory. By August 17, they were within 17 km (11 mi) of the capital city, Yellowknife, leading to an evacuation order. The wildfires caused telecommunication and internet signals to be cut off throughout the South Slave Region, which led to concerns about the feasibility of a safe evacuation.” – Wikipedia. The NWT fires amounted to nearly 30 per cent of the historically horrendous 2023 Canadian wildfire season, a season in which wildfire destruction was more than six times the long-term average of 7,000,000 acres.
Welcome and Introductions to Mike Westwick and Chris Yeremiy
Alex:
Welcome to The Gravity Well where we break down heavy ideas into small buckets anyone can handle. In our work and at play, we seek the wisdom of elders, individuals, and communities that share our knowledge to care for our water, air, land, life and resource needs. Caring for our homeland is our guide.
Jenny:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Alex. Welcome to The Gravity Well, I’m just going to add in the chat an update of what we’ve been up to, I’ll just get that link in there. So we started this conversation, these conversations, excuse me, about four weeks ago. In our first conversation, we talked about why we’re doing this. Alex and I see an opportunity to bring people together. Again, we have a lot of fractured relationships in the community and trying to rebuild the community in crisis. And so we spent the first week going through our community agreement with, actually Angie Alexander is one of the people in the audience. So Angie and I do a room together on this app. Thursday mornings. Angie hosts it, and so it’s a group of positive intelligence-minded, or sage leadership, I should say that Angie’s brand, idea is to try and stay calm and rational in crisis in terms of building leadership in teams.
That’s the focus of that work, but we’ve been using that framework to help build our community agreement and try to make sure that we’re working in a place where we open the dialogue to differences of opinion and allow people to a shared understanding. So we wrote this community agreement, we’re looking for engagement from our community to help us build off of that, but we’re trying to seek common ground. We want to make sure we have a round table chat. I’ll just show you that if you hold down on your photo, you can do an emoji. So it helps sort of move the conversation along or communicate and yeah, we just want to make sure that we hold perspectives and stay open to other people’s input. So that was our first week. Then we went into some behavioral health and safety education. The reason is that as I’m sure, well, I know certainly Chris, I know Mike, you mentioned you weren’t on the front lines, but Chris certainly works.
He’s an emergency responder, a city firefighter, and was a wildland firefighter for years before. So Chris is good at being prepared in an emergency. This is the next opportunity that we saw in having this discussion is to help people understand, first of all how to overcome our fears so that this behavioral health and safety aspect, understanding that we have a fight or flight system that helps manage our stress and just being able to see when that’s happening in this community and help us come back to a place where we can be thoughtful, rational, and our best selves. So that was our second week. Then we went on to Sourcing the News. Again, understanding that people are struggling and being able to find news that they trust, information that they trust. And so we spoke with Reagan Boychuk, a good friend of mine, and Mark and I work with Regan closely.
What he helped us come to is that we need to be objective with all new sources. We need to understand that media is a centralized process and it works in the best interest of corporations and special interests. We have to be objective about that and we need to seek evidence-informed information and for people to be operating in good faith. Those are the two takeaways I’ve had from that conversation. And then last week’s conversation was a person I’m working with as well. His name is Colin Smith, and sorry, Alex is too. And so we spoke about the nine planetary boundaries and just understanding the Earth’s ecological system, so the system that just sort of operates underneath us and that it’s in distress. And so we’re trying to help understand, first of all, what is the problem and then enable to get there, how do we respond?
Well, so that leads us to this week. And I’m going to just quickly say how I know. Well, you know how I know my husband. This is Mike, by the way. This is my husband Chris, and you’ll hear from him. Mike, thank you so much for joining us. So just for the audience and future replay audience, Mike works in the Northwest Territories and I’ll let you introduce yourself properly in a minute, Mike. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. The reason why I reached out to Mike is because I wanted to understand about being prepared for the wildfire season and what they’re seeing, what they learned and to that effect. I’m excited to have you both. Thank you so much for joining us. So yeah, I’ll just stop there and let Alex, if you want to offer a few reflections first and then we’ll get into it.
Alex:
Thanks, Jenny. Yeah, the first few episodes that we’ve been doing, we’ve been focusing on getting differing views and new information, access to new resources. I think it’s kind of a responsibility for us to do so as citizens. A bit of background in terms of how I met Jenny when she was door-knocking during the election season and she came to my house and asked, “What are the top three concerns that you have right now regarding how our province is run?” And I kind of rung my hands and I said, oh, how much time do you have? And we ended up in about a 20-minute conversation, we saw eye to eye on a lot of things and even post-election, we decided to stay in touch and then we figured out a way to find work with each other and find those common agreeable.
Alex:
And so far, so good. I mean, of course, we’re in the soft launch phase on this, so we’re still working some of the kinks out. But I think the message is much needed in today’s society that even if people disagree on some things, they can also find those common agreeable that can bridge the gaps and get the world moving in a better direction. Part of my interest in the conversation tonight is what we can do as a people to find more creative and interesting ways to do that in pursuance of what Jenny and I have been trying to do since August. Thanks for your time and welcome to the room.
Who Are the People Most Impacted by Emergencies?
Jenny:
Awesome. Since we have the two of you, I think we can do a little bit of back-and-forth as we go. Let’s start with, we gave you guys a group of five questions in advance. What we’ll do is we’ll let each of you answer kind of the when what and how questions that we had outlined for you. I’ll start with you Mike, and please unmute introduce yourself and then go into the answer to that first question please. Thanks.
Mike:
Yeah, thank you for having me. My name is Mike Westwick. I am the information unit lead for the Northwest Territories Forest Management division. We manage wildfire response and our forests there. My role in emergency management goes year-round. It starts with preparation. You want to be influencing people to make good decisions about when they’re out on the land regarding wildfire, not starting them themselves, taking steps ahead of time to take fire smart steps around their place. And then you move into response during the season. We had a historic season here in the Northwest Territories and my role was running a very small, I like to call it guerrilla warrior team of information officers, part-time off the sides of their desks being deployed into pretty serious situations this summer, getting people high impact information that they need, ensuring our responders are well-informed and supporting morale.
And certainly, we had a lot of really serious situations we dealt with this year. That’s my role. That’s my role in the emergency management world. My goal is to arm people with the information that they need to take the right actions to keep themselves safe and to build confidence that we are taking the right steps to keep them safe as well as an organization. And certainly, if we’re moving into the first question there, who are the people most impacted by emergencies? Certainly people and families. We had a whole lot of folks lose a whole lot of things this summer in the Northwest Territories during the wildfire season that we faced. And I was kind of the frontline in a lot of those places being deployed to incident management teams in some of the most devastated areas. And I saw firsthand just the level of loss that people experienced. You like to say that it’s just things. And we were fortunate enough not to lose any life this summer, but people’s entire lives are tied up in these things and our agency is dedicated to protecting those things. And it’s always unfortunate when Mother Nature throws us the sidewinder that she did this year.
Jenny:
Yeah, a hundred per cent. Thank you so much, Mike, for being here. I’m so excited to learn more from you. Appreciate it. And yeah, Chris, I’ll let Chris carry forward a little bit, but I’ll just offer a few things I heard that this is affecting everyone. It’s just stuff, yes. But also it’s having to leave your home with your family and this can impact anybody. I think it’s really important that we appreciate that. I’ll stop there and let, Chris, if you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself, your background a little bit too, and then get into your first answer. Thanks.
Chris:
Sure. My name is Chris Yeremiy. I’m Jen’s husband, which is, it’s weird with her interviewing me for 10 years. I was part of the Alberta Rapattack Firefighter program and part of building that program up. That was guys repelling out of helicopters into small little fires. You get them small before they get large, really highly trained. We spent a lot of time training, super motivated, super fit, very close-knit group, and a bunch of folks who spent a lot of time around helicopters, many of us were in forestry, had backgrounds in environmental science or forestry, and lots of other people too, just doing it as a summer job. I’ve seen a lot of wildland fires probably between at least 300, and thousands of hours on different fires from urban interface to small little spot fires. If I spent a lot of time and a lot of passion working on those, it was a seasonal position.
Eventually, when I finished my degree in land reclamation, I found that I still had a passion for working in that team environment. So I’m not allowed to say now a big city department. I’m an incident commander on our big red truck and in charge of another big red truck. I wish I could tell you which department, but for some reason, I’m not allowed to. So I’ll keep it at that. And now I have a whole other different type of position, I guess, where we’re doing a lot more with everyone’s everyday problems, living in a big city, from fires to medical emergencies to overdoses to everything you can imagine that happens in the city. People phone us to go help them at their worst possible time. And so I think I have a really good understanding of some of the things like coming from a natural disaster to I’ll say human-caused disasters.
Those are the two different things that people in emergency response have to deal with natural disasters and human cause disasters. They’re linked somewhat together and they’re not, a lot of times natural disasters will be a lot larger in scope than human-caused disasters in a city. There are differences, but a lot of similarities. And that’s why a lot of the people who worked in the forest service before or wildland have got onto jobs with large fire departments. I’m here to talk about I guess the importance of continuing to have highly motivated trained people in these roles because they are multimillion-dollar decisions that are being made by these incident commanders. And a lot of times in Wildland, a lot of these times these decisions are made by 20 or 21-year-old university students. They’re the folks in the front seat of the helicopter and as soon as they lift off in the air, they’re making those decisions. If they don’t have that experience or they don’t have the mentoring, judgement, training or leadership to put them in those positions, they could make the wrong decisions and can cause multimillion-dollar problems in the bigger scope of things. That’s what I think is important in terms of, I think while on firefighters have been underutilized, not underutilized but
Jenny:
Underappreciated.
Chris:
Underappreciated is probably the best word for it. And for many, it’s not a career, it is just a seasonal job. And I think one of the important parts is, for instance, in Alberta last year we spent a billion dollars on fighting forest fires. We brought in 2000 people from outside the province to fight these forest fires. The program that I was in, they cut in 2019, a 40-year-old program brought in by Lougheed based on the horrible fires we had in the seventies and early eighties. And I think it’s important that the public realizes that experience matters, judgement matters, mentoring the next generation, like the Rapattack program I was in, we always started training our replacements. And so that was a key part is you’re getting ready for the next generation to always be better than you and give you all the information that you’ve learned and pass it on to the next generation.
And I consider emergency response people insurance. We have slow fire halls in the City of Calgary, the City of Edmonton, and Grand Prairie, but the fact is, if you don’t have those emergency responders in those slower areas, something eventually will happen and you could lose a whole neighbourhood if the fire trucks or a whole block if the firetrucks aren’t there quick enough. And it’s the same thing out in the forest. If you don’t have the experience or you don’t have the resources, you will lose a fire. And in the long run, it’ll cost society and governments and taxpayers a lot more money.
Jenny:
I think it’d be great Chris to pause there and let Mike respond to a couple of those things. He offered some comments in the chat. Mike, can you offer some comments on what you heard Chris say, please?
Mike:
Yeah, I think what Chris is saying echoes a lot of the things that we talk about in our agency for sure. The importance of retaining talent, and making sure that mentorship happens. It’s challenging given the seasonal nature of a lot of the positions of the gig. And I feel like that lack of understanding or appreciation of the wildland folks has led to challenges in recruitment, challenges in retention, and challenges in mentorship in the lake. It’s certainly something that we talk about a lot and we work hard to address up here because like you say, I mean God knows, we know from this summer there’s huge consequences to huge consequences and massive challenges to handle when mother nature gets going in there. So yeah, appreciate your comments.
Jenny:
Thank you, Alex, I’ll go unless you want to, the next question we have…
What Are the Most Common Calls You Go To?
Alex:
I just may want to add one question. I do have some lived experience in volunteer first response dealing with the effects of safe injection, that type of stuff, the bleed out from that in the city and responding to people when they’re already at rock bottom and trying to figure out how to communicate with dispatch effectively to get them the help that they need. And then finding out time and time again that there aren’t resources available to help these people other than the sort of revolving door of the prison system. The human disasters that Chris spoke about are things that are under, understood and discussed, but they happen all around us all the time. No one’s equipped with the tools to respond to those types of things as civilians unless they have lived experience. So I was kind of thinking, would it maybe be a good idea to provide incentives to provide civilians with first responder training as opposed to just first aid? First aid is fantastic, it’s great if you have it, but first aid only applies if the person is dead, whereas emergency first response is a little more comprehensive. And I’m just kind of wondering if maybe that’s a good idea that C-C-O-H-S is sort of floating around.
Jenny:
I think that one’s good for you, Chris. It’s just around the one question I’ll just circle back for you before you answer him what are the most common calls you go to? I think if you could sort of expand on that and respond to Alex.
Chris:
Well, the city I live in, Alberta’s biggest city that I work in, I think probably half the calls we do are medicals. And a lot of those medicals, depending on what part of the city on are, I’ll say people who are homeless living on the street. And when we get those calls a lot of times is from a bystander who happens to see someone lying on the sidewalk and they say there’s a problem, but they don’t have, they’re scared to approach that person or to check on them or they were too busy. And so they just tell us the coronary that person’s on, and they usually aren’t there to meet us, not all the time, but it’s a pretty low percentage. And I don’t have any stats on this, it’s just based on my personal experience. And then we’ll find the person and they might be overdosing, they might be in full overdose mode where they’re not breathing or hardly breathing.
Other times they’re just very incapacitated and we wake them up and talk to them and then the medics will come and we decide or we’re going to send ’em to some of the different shelter systems. And in the end, we’re just, the problem is we’re just there to manage them, to manage that actual incident. And we have no other, we don’t have any other powers or we don’t have any other influence into trying to get people that help because once they get to the shelter system, I think our assumption as emergency responders is that the shelter system will help ’em, but it’s obvious that in most cases it doesn’t because they are “repeat customers” as some of us put it. The problem is the education probably with the public in terms of if you see someone down, sometimes phoning is not enough. Sometimes you have to check on them and possibly do CPR on them, and most people are just too scared of a possible violent situation. And in the end, I’ll be honest, they’re scared of touching that person because you’re not sure if they have any communicable diseases. And I think that’s sort of the problem sometimes with the public dealing with the overdose crisis,
Alex:
I did have that issue at times because sometimes I’d be on the phone with dispatch services and they would say, are there drugs or blah blah, blah involved, but I’m not going to do a personal search. I’m not going to search their effects or anything just in case there are exposed needles in their pockets or knives or fentanyl or anything else that I might be unaware of or I don’t have the proper PPE to manage. So in a lot of those cases, I would just kind of rely on fire medical usually because calling them, they were faster than calling anyone else, and that would usually help solve the problem. I was one of the few who had enough training at least where I could stick around and I had nothing but good experiences with fire medical. I just find a lot of people, not only don’t have the education or the wherewithal or the know-how, but they don’t have the training and the unexpectedly, as you were saying, get put into a circumstance where they kind of panic, they freeze or do what they can and then they just run away they flight.
They fall into those human reactive sort of things. But I mean, in a strange way it’s fully understandable, but just a little bit of training can equip a lot of people with some necessary skills to give folks who are down and out an opportunity.
What Does a Good Emergency Response Look Like?
Jenny:
Yeah, thanks for that discussion. The next question we had for you guys was about what does good quality emergency response looks like. Mike, reflecting on all the, I hope I’m describing this well according to you, but the chaos that you guys had to undergo this past summer, can you tell us what were the good things that you saw in the actions of people? And I don’t know if that’s just the case, but I heard there’s a lot of public people stepping in and doing things maybe not potentially asked for, and I’m just curious being that these things are happening at a scale and the speed that does sort of seems to be bigger than the resources, what you can say in terms of public participation. I guess that’s a two-part question. First of all, what does a good response look like and then what does public good public response look like?
Mike:
Yeah, I think that a good response in my side of the world is often very much dealing with the human side of things and ensuring that others are taking action and are informed. I think that step one is making sure that you’re not making your plan in the middle of a crisis. While it was a situation that was beyond anything we’d ever experienced up there up here, we certainly had a plan in place for crisis and risk communications and we followed that plan. What that looks like, step one is availability. You need to be available if people are counting on you in a crisis. Step two is recognizing that people are undergoing trauma when they’re facing an emergency like this in a crisis in the context of communicating to the public and communities. That means making sure that you’re following trauma-informed practice.
In this case, it means making sure that you understand that people can only take in so much information at once. It’s about distilling in all that incident information that may be complex and distilling it down to the things that are most important to people while still ensuring that you’re getting the message across and building trust in folks that you’re doing everything you can as an organization to keep those folks safe. And the next step is to be responsive. People are going to be looking for information all the time. They’re going to be reaching out to you and they’re going to be having a hard time processing information. Making sure that you’re making every effort to play your part and be responsive to people and beyond just sticking to the facts, you need to recognize that empathy is a critical piece to every bit of your communication and response in a crisis to be effective.
Or the last piece that I had put there in terms of what a good emergency response in crisis communications looks like is following it through to the end, even after the immediate risk or crisis begins to subside, you’ve got, oftentimes you have people moving into recovery and you’re going to want to need to continue to be with them all the way through, making sure that you’re continuing to follow through even after the biggest crises subside. A lot of times people can take their eye off the ball during recovery, I think, and you want to avoid that every step of the way. And of course, foundational to every bit of this, you need to be honest and you need to build credibility, and that means being honest about the good, the bad, and the ugly sometimes. That’s something that I think in the government communications world that you have to push back against.
Sometimes when you’re doing crisis communications, you are not doing public relations, you’re doing public information and people are going to trust you more. Even people are going to trust you. If you’re honest about the fact that you might’ve screwed up or something might’ve gone wrong or something could have gone better, then if you’re covering it up so to speak or trying to talk around it, there was certainly a couple of instances this summer where we did make mistakes and we had to be honest about it. Regarding public participation, I think that a lot of people in the Northwest Territory stood tall and contributed, volunteered, and played amazing roles in our incidents, particularly around the City of Yellowknife. There was a giant collection of volunteers and local contractors that mobilized very quickly to start building out protections around the city of Yellowknife. We were able to integrate them into our incident there and ensure a coordinated effort as best as we could.
And I think that that spirit of volunteerism, people wanting to pitch in, it’s always difficult to integrate these into a command structure on many occasions. And I think that spirit is something that we as emergency managers should be trying to harness in some way. But again, it requires a lot of upfront planning to make sure that things are getting done safely and getting done in a coordinated way. I’d be lying if I said that there was a full-on plan to integrate all these volunteers, but we managed to get it done at the moment at the time, and that was with great credit to the city of Yellowknife and our emergency measures office and everyone else we were in unified command with there in terms of responding to the wildfires there. Yeah, it was pretty amazing the kinds of things that people did in a pinch up here to keep each other safe. It’s the worst times that sometimes bring out the best in people.
Jenny:
Yeah, ain’t that the truth? Thank you, Mike. There are so many pieces in there, and this is recorded we’ll take some really important nuggets out there. But a couple of things I can remember that you offered is, number one, be very communicative upfront. People are not going to know what’s happening. They’re going to want to have information made easily available to them. Be responsive when people need something, make sure they get some sort of response. And the other thing is that, like you said, people came together in crisis and there was lots of opportunity to harness that community effort, that community engagement in that moment. Chris, I’ll ask you the same question. How does one respond well in an emergency and what are the qualities that you like to see?
Chris:
I think the number one thing is having a system in place, an incident command system. The incident command system that we all use in North America now is based on the US Forest Service, and it’s been integrated into a disaster management system for many different types of incidents. And so it has a very, it’s well known over North America, I could take someone from a fire crew in Idaho and bring them up here and they would know who they’re reporting to and what their tasks were kind of thing. That’s super important that we have people who understand the system, who they report to as well as span of control. So you are looking after a certain amount of people or a certain amount of crews. That’s usually three to seven is the optimum. And once you get past that seven, that causes a lot of chaos because you can’t keep track of everyone.
That’s the number one thing is having a proper system in place so that people understand and they understand who their supervisor is, what the roles and responsibilities are, and ensuring that supervisors aren’t overwhelmed with all these resources that are placed on them because once they’re overwhelmed, good decisions aren’t being made. Then number two is having some form of pre-suppression I call it. And just because that’s my background is being in wildfire, but I’ll say pre-planning of resources. So in many cases, and I keep bringing up let’s say floods or wildfires, wildfires, we know when it’s hot and dry, when lightning’s coming, and so we can have resources in place before some of these fires start. The crux is if we don’t get lightning and we get rain, then you possibly could have wasted money on pre-suppressing an area like having all these resources in place prior to the accident.
But the fact is it’s insurance and I think people have to understand that having these resources before the fires get there and getting them when they’re small is the number one most important thing to do. You have lots of resources up there to handle the situation because once the fires get big, they’re called campaign fires. When they get really big, it’s like a war which costs lots of money. Some of these fires that we’ve had in Alberta and up north were probably costing one to $2 million a day with lots of aircraft, and lots of resources from outside the country coming in. It’s all very expensive. Having those resources in place and adequate numbers prior to the emergency is one way of containing that natural disaster. Another thing we have to think about is do we protect in place or evacuate. In structural firefighting, if we have a high-rise fire or we have a fire in a nursing home, what’s the most difficult thing in the nursing home is getting enough manpower to get those people out or in a hospital.
A lot of times we will say, “You know what? Are we going to protect and place, or are we going to get rid of the hazard? Which is the fire. Everyone in the rooms has lots of resources outside on different floors to tell people to get back in the rooms. The situation is under control in quotation marks and because the last thing you want is affirmed, people who are in wheelchairs or can’t even walk, have to climb down 20 flights of stairs, that is more of an emergency. That’s another big factor. Do you protect in place or do you evacuate, you’re right, and telling people… What Mike said is being honest with people, being honest in what the situation is and having empathy with their situation. And those are the big things I think that ICS system, pre-suppression, protection in place, or evacuation and just being honest and human to the people that are being affected.
Alex:
There was a lot to take in there. Yeah, that’s kind of the thing I remember, it is been a long time since I took first responder training. I took it when it was still EMFR under the College of Paramedics at say it was post 9/11 and that’s when you had 110-story buildings and firefighters walking up 50, 60, 70 flights of stairs, and it was just completely unfeasible to respond in those circumstances, those structural circumstances and the whole industry just kind of turned upside down after that. And I was involved in high-rise security at the time for millennium protections, and I was watching this happen and I was like, well, what do we practically do? And in terms of material advantage, for instance, in a nursing home, the example that you gave, there are only so many stair chairs to take people down flights of stairs.
It’s a specific piece of technology, it’s a specific piece of equipment, and you have a limited amount of time. In real-time, sometimes I would imagine at least that you’re stuck in a circumstance where you want folks to stay in place. I remember your room number, I got to get to the next one, tell them to stay in place. I got to get to the next one, stay in place. Meanwhile, the air is thickening with black smoke. I’ve only run into one burning building in my life. I successfully made it out alive after four floors, but I was just banging on doors, just get out and it’s a very, very chaotic situation and a lot of information can get lost. I mean, back to the original question that I asked, is it a good idea to allow budget-wise more training for civilians so that emergency services can focus on the priority tasks at hand, but other people have additional training to help others out?
Chris:
It’s tough because we do high rises in downtown Calgary and have fire marshals who are supposed to get everyone off their floor, and so some of it’s already there. I can tell you when fire alarms go off in many high rises, residential high rises in Calgary, most people do not leave their rooms. They stay up there because they think it’s another false alarm. I think there can be some training. I think it’s a very large number of people to train, and it just would be difficult, I think to wrap your arms around getting people to educate themselves on it. Just knowing people myself, I think we need to under, there’s a certain type of human psychology that is more beneficial to teaching the incident commanders of some of these who are in charge of crews to understand what our people are empathetic or think it’s a problem unless they see tons of smoke, they just hear the alarms and go about their day in their rooms, whatever.
I think the better training would be training the first responder leaders or the incident commanders more about human psychology and realizing that sometimes it’s difficult to dump a building out, especially when firefighters are going up with a hose and there are tons of people coming down. It makes for a slower response. Every building is different. Some buildings have intercom systems where you can talk to people that go through the building, some don’t. It’s a very difficult situation, but I think more training about the psychology of how people react to emergencies would be more beneficial to the incident commanders, so then they can figure out I need more resources to decide to evacuate or to protect in place.
Alex:
Amen. Yeah, in the medical first response training, it was always just kind of like, okay, is it a load and go? Is it stay and stabilize? It’s like you have people dealing with the gen pop and then you have people who are focused on the emergency at hand and you have to remain highly focused and skillfully detached from the human side of the equation. When you’re kind of running the show, if you’re in charge of stabilizing head and neck for instance, then you’re in charge of the scene. You’re translating to whoever’s on the phone with dispatch services, et cetera, et cetera. To give you an example of just what you were saying about the buildings, some have security measures, some have floor-by-floor fire marshals, and others don’t. The condo that I used to live in, didn’t even have an exit map in front of the elevator and I complained to the board for years like, you need an exit map.
And then there was a huge flood coming from the roof one year in the building. The fire department was there and they were like, where’s the stairwells? And nobody in the building knew there were 110 residences in that unit and nobody knew where the emergency exits were. And I just thought to myself, a lot of this stuff could be low budget sort of preemptive like, here’s a map, here’s the emergency exits here where you need to go. Here’s a must point. It doesn’t have to burn the budget. And I think you’re probably a hundred per cent on point when you said, we just need to train our first responders in terms of how to deal with what types of people are going to freeze, what types of people are going to flee, what types of people are just going to freak out and they need answers right away, and all you’re trying to do is just get ’em down the stairs and out the building, we’ll give ’em answers later. That type of stuff seems as though those circumstances are extremely chaotic and not everyone has a cool head. I appreciate your answer to that. Yeah, I think you’re on point a hundred per cent. Yeah, it’d be cool to see more first responders trained in human psychology.
Jenny:
Yeah. Okay, Mike, it’s a similar question coming to you. We had in here for you what happens when things go wrong. I heard something awesome from you, which is just so true and seems rarer these days. Thank you for being honest. I heard that right away if things are going wrong, the first thing is just to be honest about where we’re having failures and adjusting, but if you can add to that. And then the next question is sort of similar to what Alex primed for Chris here, which is around what the average person considers.
Mike:
I’ll talk about an example from this summer. We had an ignition operation go wrong in a small community here. Our team on the ground was hit with a big downdraft that was not visible because the sky was just absolutely blacked out. It was a real confluence of bad situations and contrary to weather forecasts and stuff like that, and a test fire had flared up and it got close enough to damage somebody’s home in a community. It was a terrible situation. And when you talk about war, that place did feel like war because it’s a fly-in fly-out community. We have a whole lot of those in the Northwest Territories, which challenges everything that we do in terms of wildfire fighting. We had almost a hundred people kind of at various bases and stuff like that ready to go that they couldn’t get in for reinforcements, and there was this 550,000-hectare mega fire heading towards the community.
We were in a total defensive stance and then this happened. That is completely contrary to what we want to see happen. It’s very unfortunate when we see things go wrong on that front. Now, I’ll talk a little bit about the response to that from my end of things, the crisis and risk communications and as the information officer on duty under the EOC at the time now to whittle it down, we were just honest. We were honest. We went through the TikTok of what happened and we expressed empathy and we made a commitment to help this person rebuild after their home was damaged in this situation. And it’s not something that elicits a great reaction when an agency has an operation go wrong and causes damage to the folks that they’re serving, but I think that what the response did in terms of being proactive and honest and empathetic with the situations of the folks who were impacted there ultimately led to our agency maintaining the trust that we likely would have a lost in the public sphere if we were not honest about the things that happen. And I think that’s important with wildfire management. I don’t think that the average person who’s consuming media has much of an idea of the things that wild line folks face out there when they’re out in the bush fighting these things that in some cases can’t be fought. There are a lot of times when not a big enough army you could put in front of some of these fires that rip through the boreal sometimes to stop it in its tracks without assistance from the weather.
Jenny:
That’s awesome. Yeah. Well, I mean not awesome. Yeah, I can only imagine how difficult it is to have things change. And one thing I’ll tip to you, Chris, before I pass it off as Chris always says a crisis doesn’t happen from one thing. It happens from several things happening at one time. I can see how several things stacking up together went in a different direction. And I think it’s really important to be, like you said, honest and to maintain that trust is to make sure you remain honest when it’s difficult. Thank you so much for that. Chris. Alex sort of had you answer this one question. I’ll just focus on, do you have a story that you wish to share in terms of an emergency gone wrong or how did you course correct in a difficult situation?
Chris:
I can bring up one of my wildland stories. I wasn’t, I’ll say the captain at the time or the leader when I was on a rap troop, but I was the second in command, I was on the ground. It was a challenging fire, a tipping point fire call. What I would say is a seven-person crew with a medium helicopter can contain it, but it’s one of those where you could lose it too. So how it went was the air bombers or the planes dropped retardants on a section and then they left. Our helicopter was bucketing on the fire. We were already on the ground except for my leader who was in the helicopter with them, they had to go for fuel. And then the fire just started getting away from us on the ground. We had pumps and hose, we just couldn’t keep up with it.
I made a decision to call back the air tankers because we didn’t have any air support. And as soon as you do that, the dispatcher or the duty officer’s probably, what the hell are those guys doing out there? How are they losing this? I think the biggest thing, it wasn’t because we weren’t working super hard or anything, just the conditions, the fire just started hitting a patch of fuel and it got away from us. And so do you double down and say, you know what, if I don’t call for backup, the fire’s going to get bigger and it’ll be worse. Or do you hold onto your pride or give up your pride and say, you know what? We need more help. They have to come back and give us another retardant line. That’s what it’s called to contain the fire. And that’s what I did.
And then we did sort of get a talking to in the office, but I think in the end it’s the right decision because it contained the fire. If we hadn’t called for that bomber to come back, the fire would’ve been much larger and it would’ve become a campaign fire. I think we have to give incident commanders some leeway when they’re making decisions and saying, yeah, I need more resources and not get questioned why they’d need those resources. We’re on the ground, we’re the guys there, but a lot of times the person who’s in an office somewhere is judging those incident commanders. You have to give your incident commanders on the ground the benefit of the doubt.
Jenny:
Yeah, it sounds like, Chris, you’re saying it, it’s trusting your gut to err on the side of caution, and I’ve heard from your stories when you were in forestry that it’s always that you feel pressure in a sense to not overspend or not call resources away from something else. And it is, like you said, sort of swallowing your pride to be able to say, no, this needs to happen. This is more important. The problem is more important than potentially letting it get worse. I think that’s important. I’m just going to offer to especially Angie. Hi, Janet. Thank you so much for joining us too. But if you wanted to ask a question, Angie, please, like I said, Angie uses this room quite a bit, so you’re welcome to if you’d like to join us.
Using What You’ve Experienced, How Do You Prepare for New Emergencies?
Jenny:
Mike, I think this is a really good one for you. With what you learned last year, how are you preparing for this year differently? I heard you already talk about preparedness and stuff, but I’m hoping I’m asking about repeat exposure to emergencies and anticipating that there’s going to be more of this. How you are preparing and how you might do things differently this year?
Mike:
Yeah, I think the number one thing that I am focused on is improving the way that our joint information systems work amongst all the various cooperating agencies that wind up responding to these large-scale disasters, there’s several different agencies you wind up having representation with. And I think what we found when we were at a point where 70% of our entire population in this territory was evacuated was that we needed to formalize some of the things that we might have typically just kind of dealt with in a group chat back and forth because we’re a small territory, but when you have a bunch of different agencies taking on a lot of different geographically discreet or distinct rather incidents, you need to have that formalized, strong, documented, and easily stood up joint information systems. Public information officers can collaborate at all levels systematically and utilize resources better on that front as well.
I think that there were times when we had to work out times some redundancies happening within the system. I’m focused on working with my colleagues at our territorial and regional emergency management organizations to get a strong joint information system in place to service our unified commands and sometimes different but related incident management teams next year. I think that all things considered, we did an okay job this year, but as what happens when you have your most intense year ever, it puts all your systems and processes that you’ve put in place to the test beyond that big work of really formalizing a proper joint information system for emergency communications here I’m just working to harden, harden those processes and tweak them where they needed to be improved based on the huge stress test that we took on.
Jenny:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Mike, what I heard that’s terrific about that is I’m noticing in the groups that I’m working with, there’s a lack of sort of coordinated coalition efforts. I think what I’m hearing from you is what you learned from last year, correct me if I’m wrong, is that you see that opportunity as well to make sure that everybody’s coalesced before there’s an emergency out there. Same question to you, Chris. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, quickly, Mike, please.
Have Overwintering Fires Increased?
Mike:
I just saw in the chat somebody asking about over-winter fires.
Jenny:
Yeah, thank you.
Mike:
Angie. There. I can just quickly say that in the area surrounding the community of Enterprise, Hay River, and around Yellowknife, we are seeing a significant overwintering fire occurring. That’s to be expected after a large season like this. The last time we had a historic season was back in 2014. In 2015, we saw the first 11 fires of the following fire season be related to overwintering fires. Basically what happens is that fire burns deep down in the duff, deep down into the soil, especially in years where we’re experiencing drought like we did last year. Those fires burn deeper and hotter snow falls, and that heat stays trapped. There’s still a mild ignition source in there, keeping it smoldering throughout the wintertime. It’s not getting a lot of oxygen, it’s not growing a lot, but it’s certainly there. The good news is that they’re usually not a huge problem in that they’re in areas where you’re already surrounded by burned forest.
But the second piece of the puzzle is it certainly places us in target detection heading into a new fire season. As the snow melts away, that fire trapped under there starts getting some more oxygen and starts to pick up, and we want to take the right steps as quickly as possible to protect people and property in that case. I mean, all told not an uncommon phenomenon up here. We have a lot of really good fuel deep in the soil in the boreal here, but certainly, more happening more often this year than in other years.
How Do You Prepare Based on Past Experiences?
Jenny:
Yeah. Go ahead, Chris. Thank you, Mike, for that. Go ahead. I guess in your, Chris, we’ve talked about repeat exposure to emergencies and how are you adjusting or what things are you seeing that are different in your career and how you help manage that for yourself, I guess that is what I’m asking.
Chris:
Okay. I have pre-plans in my ICS head for different [scenarios], as a structural firefighter now or incident commander. I already have a pre-planned in my head based on the type of buildings and how I would manage that situation or where I would put resources in many cases, and I usually, let’s say a high-rise or large warehouse, I’ve already in my head, no matter what the situation, I’ve already decided, I create a system that starts big or thinking it’s going to be a very big incident. Then I put certain divisions in place so that I have other supervisors on different sides of that building or different floors of that building that are my eyes and ears instead of just sending crews up with certain tasks. That’s okay for a smaller incident. For large, with tons of people, lots of people in the building, you need lots of resources. That means you have to have a lot more supervisors than your eyes and ears when you’re trying to manage the situation. That’s the biggest thing I do now and having more resources and calling extra resources, even having them sit and wait, not doing anything close by to be activated is the thing I do. So to reduce stress and to have those resources if they’re needed, that’s the number one thing I do now.
Alex:
Nice. So quick question on that, quick question, Chris, if you can
Chris:
Alex. Sorry.
What Do Backup Resources Do When Waiting to Act?
Alex:
Yeah, that’s all good. Quick question on that. Do you think that the resources for you to do that, to have observers in these buildings are available? And if they’re not, should they be additional? One caveat to the same question is that most of the time nothing bad is happening and these people are just kind of sitting, waiting, and observing. How do you like to boost morale so that they can stay on their toes? Is there anything that you do to keep them optimistic and at the ready?
Jenny:
He’s saying the people in waiting, I think, am I right, Alex?
Chris:
Well, the people in waiting, I think they just know in the end, they’re in a staging. This has happened, and I think Mike knows too. People are in staging in Wildland or wherever, and they’re just waiting there to get tasked out. And sometimes you’re trying to figure out the incident itself or what the problems are because what it is, we’re problem solvers and we’re setting resources to the problem. Sometimes you send one crew there and you ask, Hey, what do you need? Or what do you see? And you go, okay, I’m going to send you two more crews. And you want it to be in an organized way so that you’re not wasting those resources. And sometimes people just have to wait, and those crews have to be patient and wait. Once you have freelancing, then you have no accountability. All of these emergency responders that you’re putting into dangerous situations, and that’s the worst thing you could be doing. They could be doing things you don’t want done, you don’t know where they are. If there’s a building collapse or an explosion, then you have to, that’s a whole new incident now you’re trying to find part of the new emergency is locating and saving the emergency responders.
Alex:
That makes a lot of sense. When I took OHS, there was some specific training on that. I took the confined space, entry-level and rescue. They run you through these tunnels and you have to do gas tests and everything. And there is a real problem with people who first respond just because they want to save somebody. They know somebody’s in danger, but they end up putting themselves in danger and making the incident worse. Yeah, that’s a really good point. Thank you.
Chris:
That happens with, people who have died with H2S, sour gas wells in Alberta, we have a lot of sour gas wells in Alberta. Say they’re drilling a well and they don’t expect it to be sour gas. They don’t have VAs on when they’re drilling or anything. They don’t have anyone ready. Someone has passed out, they see ’em, they go and try to grab ’em to pull ’em out. That guy drops. Someone who’s in a building sees two guys down the ground, he runs out there to grab those guys. The sour gas hits him, and he falls. Now you have three people down. A big part of it is having accountability and having the people that have the proper equipment and knowledge to do the rescue, I guess is what I’m saying.
Takeaways
Jenny:
Yeah. Okay. I see where we’re actually past the hour here, thank you both so much. I’m going to offer some key takeaways, and I am going to, if I can push one other question to you guys as I do, my key takeaways are I’ve heard a lot of information around the incident command, how there’s a system out there that is known across North America about sizing the incident accordingly and communicating, being responsive, being honest, being clear about what you’re seeing and following the evidence. Thank you all for this. My question, putting forward to you, and please offer your takeaways as well, and we’ll wrap up is around water. We have a severe drought warning in southern Alberta right now, and I heard from somebody last week that up north there weren’t lakes to tap into for buckets for firefighting. And I’m curious, Mike, and maybe because you’re not, I appreciate, that you’ve already said you’re not a first, you haven’t been boots on the ground, but I’m curious if you have different strategies or different thoughts concerning water shortages. And Chris, I know we touched on this question too, I’ll ask the same for you when Mike’s done. Thanks.
Mike:
I mean, while I’m not a firefighter, I was deployed to incident management teams and did see the impacts of this around Hay River. There were areas they were relying on for buckets, some kind of smaller areas so they could do quick turnaround, and they wound up resorting to using water tenders to fill these backups, basically putting down the bladders and replacing those, what was a natural kind of ponds and stuff like that that were around there taking water from the lake, the big lake, Great Slave Lake, which is at its lowest ever point right now, but still lots of water there if you need it, even under low conditions. But yeah, definitely something that we’ve faced challenges with up here. And I mean, another note on water, early season, early season fires the first fire of the year. We don’t usually wind up seeing a big incident in May here we don’t have the spring dip like they do in Alberta in the same way. But Hay River was evacuated twice this year, and the first incident happened in early May. When we were taking the skimmers out in the buckets, there was still ice all over parts of the water, and you had to get creative about where you were dropping your buckets and where your skimmers were going. It was a challenging and crappy situation, especially since one of our electors went unserviceable in one of the early days of that fire.
Jenny:
What’s US, Mike?
Mike:
Unserviceable? Sorry.
Chris:
I haven’t heard that word in a long time, Mike.
Mike:
Chris was going to pop in there. I heard that he was just chomping at the bit, man, for sure. But yeah, anyways, so yeah, water’s top of mind for us. We had to use some unusual tactics. We’ve got so much water up here, that it’s not usual for us to have to basically ship water from elsewhere on the incident to service it best.
Jenny:
And thank you for clarifying, Mike, because right, that’s what I had heard it was the ice that was the restriction in your case. Yeah, thanks for clarifying. And then yeah, please your takeaways before we pass it on to Chris.
Mike:
Yeah, I think that my biggest takeaways have just been the importance of mentorship and training and the importance of pre-planning and structuring the plan for emergencies before they happen. And I think that’s the case for people who are dealing with the frontline, the operational side, the tactical side of incidents. And it’s true of folks who provide a different sort of service like myself, in terms of in some ways acting like a psychologist sometimes for folks and dealing with the human side of those things primarily. Yeah, common ground there both from the operational side and from the support side.
Jenny:
Amazing. Thank you so much, Mike. I appreciate your time for this. Chris, your turn, please. Your takeaways.
Chris:
In terms of water, I think in South Alberta there could be some challenges if we do get some big fires here. Usually, in Southern Alberta we don’t get the fires till the fall or not fall, but late summer of course, who knows what could happen within El Nino year? There will be some challenges in terms of the city who knows with more water restrictions, there might be some limits. If we get certain fires, there might have to be challenges in terms of at some point what’s more valuable, the building that’s going to get knocked down or the water that we’re putting on it. That could be a challenge. I don’t think that comes across on many first responders in our big cities, but it’s something you might have to think about in the future. Overall, I think, or takeaway is that mentoring is a huge thing about teaching the next generation of incident commanders your knowledge.
They’re better than you. And that’s the biggest thing I think we can, that I try to teach, as well as trusting the expertise of people that are junior to you. They have different experiences, they have different backgrounds, and just because they’ve been on a couple of years, they could be way more valuable on a certain call than you are with 20 or 30 years on. And I would ask those incident commanders out there. It is. We’ve hired people that have gone through so much to get on, let’s say a structural fire department in a big city. Yet once they get on, they’re back to zero. I’ve told Jen in the past, it’s taken me, I’m 19 years in the department I’m in now, and it’s taken me 17 years to get back to where I was after my last year of Wildland.
In terms of my expertise and intuition and judgement and all that stuff while I was a wildland firefighter because I started on the bottom of another organization, I would ask the next generation of people in the professional departments who have full-time jobs to take a look at those junior people, although they’re junior on your department, they weren’t junior, whatever background they came from, if that was a wildland firefighter or a master electrician or search and rescue or military or whatever, they have a certain expertise that is very valuable to your organization and to use those resources appropriately, even though they could be the junior person on your crew.
Jenny:
Love it, Chris. And you really live by that. Thank you for sharing that. Alex, you’ve got the last word.
Alex:
Oh geez. Well, there are a lot of takeaways from this, I won’t use your time too much. But I think Chris, one of the things that you touched on is extreme importance and it comes from military leadership. I was raised by a base commander, P-P-C-L-I, and one of his tenets in leadership was it should be decentralized because you need information from all walks of life, whether they’re subordinates or whether they’re juniors or whether they’re in high command. You need all the information that you can obtain so that you can come to the best executive decision. But also it’s important as a leader, an effective leader to have that understanding that what your task is, is to train other leaders. And that’s really what I took from that as far as preemptive emergency management and this Mike and Chris included, I think that’s kind of the name of the game.
Alex:
That’s what we need to be looking at. We need to be adapting our joint operational commands. We need to inform people where necessary in terms of incidents when they happen, how they can react, what they should do, and what they should consider doing. And then we also need to help people prepare for potential incidents. We can have as many predictive models as we can. There’s always that surprise, there’s always that tunnel vision. There’s always that thing that we didn’t consider in any of these situations. And I think both of you touched on that. And yeah, sometimes things can go wrong and a lot of the times things do go right and typically in the public discourse when it comes to the media, they only fixate on when things go wrong. The successes are never known, but the failures are always known, and we shouldn’t be throwing the babies out with the bath water. We should be looking at how to refine these systems, how to communicate more effectively and work together in whatever capacity, civilian and servant alike. I think from both of you, you opened my eyes and I’m so grateful that I got to have the privilege of conversing with you, however limited my converse was. But yeah, thank you again and I’m going to take all this home. I’ve taken furious notes and I appreciate your expertise and service. Thank you.
Jenny:
Go ahead, Chris. I think you wanted to add.
Chris:
No, I just want to thank you for doing this and keep it up.
Jenny:
Thanks. Okay. Thank you so much again, Mike. I appreciate it. It’s been great getting to meet you a little bit and yeah, we’ll reach out to you again in the future as well. Again, trying to help people understand how to be prepared for being disrupted. You guys experienced this year. I think we can expect this to be more and different. I think there’s a lot to learn in community and even if that is outside of the jurisdiction, I think we can learn from each other. Again, thank you so much.
Mike:
Well, I mean, I think Alberta and the Northwest Territories are officially one big community. After this summer. Edmonton was like little Yellowknife man or neighbourhoods of it, all the hotels.
Mike:
Thank you guys for the invite and appreciated the conversation. Learned a lot from you guys.
Jenny:
Thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your participation. Okay, goodnight everyone. Take care for now.
Updates via Keepers of the Water
The Keepers of the Water hosted a webinar in March 2024 entitled Dene Nation Speaks Out on the 2023 Wildfire Devastation and Why a Public Inquiry is Needed. In it, you hear from Chief Frank Andrew, that the inquiries planned do not include the public, including First Nation elders. Then, the Dene Nation Chief Gerald Antoine calls for public representation in the assessment, planning, process, and impact analysis. There were fourteen communities devastated last year, and 70 per cent evacuated. Our family and context matter. “It is not going our way, that’s why it’s been difficult.” – Dene Nation elder.
The Athabascan Tribal Council, Athabasca River Metis, and the Friendship Center Movement generated a report in 2018 on the 2017 wildfire season. The report “exposed a lack of Federal, Provincial, Territorial, and Municipal leadership,” which resulted in a disjointed Indigenous management planning and communication system.
Dene Elder Francois Paulette explains that leaders at all levels of government are not educated in traditional knowledge. Eighty per cent of the town of Enterprise burned, and that town is also seeking an inquiry. The funding for climate change flows through communities and does not reach those impacted. There was not a strong working relationship between the provinces and with the First Nations and Metis communities. He’s seeking action from the Assembly of First Nations.
Chief Fred Sangris of Yellowknife had to evacuate. He explains that climate change is due to global industrialization and Indigenous people are experiencing the consequences first when they act as keepers of the land. The leaders of industrial companies are not listening to the people impacted by their decisions. It is estimated that 80 per cent of critical habitats are in the care of Indigenous communities, and these communities need to be empowered to protect them as they aim to do! Instead, the communities are taken from or told what to do. You must let Indigenous people and knowledge lead the way!
Where is all the wildlife that feeds Indigenous people? What will feed you if you do not pay attention to these losses and the different responses that are required of you? How will you continue to pay for the rebuilding of communities if you do not change the way you respond?
Theresa Etchinelle from the Tulita-Shuta Got’ine First Nation explains that they felt abandoned and had to make their own decisions, in some cases on their dime. Trevor Teed from Dene Nations explains that Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officials notified their own families before alerting the public. His family was scattered throughout the province of Alberta.
Jesse Cardinal explains that there are provincial and federal policies that allow industrial freshwater use when you are facing severe drought, and how the decision-making process does not include the public and Indigenous communities.
Trevor Teed and Wilbert Cook from Dene Nation tell you that the evacuation centers were chaotic and poorly supported. The Red Cross did not appreciate that more than one family lives in the same residence so beds were not provided for all residents.
The panel concluded with Jesse Cardinal explaining there will be future conversations for community members to share their experiences and recommendations.