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City staff get real-world disaster experience from B.C.’s wildfires

City of Nanaimo staff helped out in parts of province most impacted by wildfires
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Brad McRae, City of Nanaimo’s chief operating officer, hands over his cell phone. Its screen shows a post-apocalyptic scene of hundreds of charcoal-black trees standing in stark relief against barren scorched earth and smoke grey sky.

Just one of this summer’s forest fires near Williams Lake painted this vignette of how nearly 1.3 million hectares of the province, cremated by nearly 1,300 wildfires, now appears after B.C.’s worst fire season.

“Walk out into a moonscape, step foot on what used to be an inhabited area with homes, put your hand on the ground and it still feels warm, dig your hand in to what was trees and bush and everything else and it feels like fine Caribbean sand, go walking across and have your foot slip into a hole that used to be a tree root, the fire burned so hot it ate the entire root,” McRae said. “The smell of constant smoke, constant sinus. The air is constantly thick and it’s eerily quiet.”

When the province called for help battling this summer’s wildfires, Nanaimo city staff and volunteers trained to deal with large-scale emergencies stepped up to travel to trouble zones and bring home valuable real-world disaster management experience.

McRae spent eight days in August as the Emergency Operations Centre director in Williams Lake, helping decide what areas could have evacuation orders lifted to allow families to return home, while assessing which areas needed to be kept under evacuation alerts. He’s one of at least seven municipal staff and four volunteers – not counting Nanaimo firefighters and RCMP members – who joined their counterparts from across B.C. to assist with the multitude of tasks that must be performed in a major disaster.

Wildfires forced thousands of people into the hands of volunteers such as Jane Alexander with the Nanaimo Emergency Program who spent a week of 12-hour days at a reception centre in Kamloops.

“When the evacuees come in, we register them to make sure that the province knows who’s where,” Alexander said.

Evacuees were sent to hotels, provided meals and other services. About 100 families came to Nanaimo.

How evacuees looked after one another, especially those from First Nations, made a lasting impression.

“When a whole community got evacuated, I noticed when they showed up at the reception centre how they were all checking with one another, making sure they were going to all be OK,” she said.

Karen Lindsay, Nanaimo Emergency Program coordinator, worked at the provincial regional emergency operations centre in Kamloops, aware of how decisions made at the centre could impact people’s lives.

“I think what was most memorable for me was watching the anxiety on these people of having to go back or being told they can’t go back and not knowing … You sit there and wonder, what would I do in that situation?” Lindsay said. “Dads had to still go to work so they were shipping off to work somewhere else with their companies and, you know, mom may have to stay behind, worried about money, worried about how do we move forward if the worst happens when we go back?”

In evacuated Williams Lake, David Myles, Nanaimo roads and traffic manager, worked with multiple agencies – RCMP, B.C. Wildfire Service, First Nations, local governments – on plans to re-evacuate residents if fires again threatened the town.

“It was pretty surreal … once you got past the police and military road blocks, you know, at 100 Mile House it was like a 1960s black-and-white movie,” Myles said. “You woke up in the morning and nobody was left in the world and you’re driving, going through these communities and there’s nobody. There’s not a vehicle moving. There’s not a cow standing. There’s nothing.”

All of them came home with stories and mental images from their experiences.

“Like, Cache Creek, the RCMP that were there to protect everything were going around watering people’s gardens for them,” Lindsay said.

There were tales of homes and businesses wiped out by fire, mixed with good news, such as from a rancher, who told Myles, with tears in his eyes, how he drove through burned desolation then rounded a corner to find his home and barn still standing and 40 head of cattle standing there, waiting to be fed.

“With any disaster, the resiliency of the people is really impressive,” Myles said.

photos@nanaimobulletin.com



Chris Bush

About the Author: Chris Bush

As a photographer/reporter with the Nanaimo News Bulletin since 1998.
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