Fort Mac’s telephone town-hall is a lifesaver in the midst of chaos
Premier Rachel Notley made the decision to hold these town hall phone calls so the government could directly communicate as much information as possible.

thestar.com
May 16, 2016
By Katie Daubs

Melanie, from Fort McMurray, is the next caller on the line: She knows that she has to wait two weeks before there is a plan for her to come home, but she wants to know why. She sounds slightly frustrated, but polite.

For those just tuning in, this is the nightly telephone town hall for wildfire evacuees who have registered with the Red Cross. Last week, the cellphones of evacuees rang every night around 7 p.m., with an hour and a half of information and questions to people like Premier Rachel Notley and wildfire manager Chad Morrison. The province has used telephone town halls before, but this is the first time they’ve called cellphones, out of necessity.

For the level of detail Melanie is looking for, Minister of Municipal Affairs Danielle Larivee - the host - is going to pass this question to Shane Schreiber, the managing director of the Alberta Emergency Management Agency, who was the chief of staff for flood recovery in 2013 through 2014. He speaks for three minutes about the complex task ahead.

First they have to do drive-by damage assessments - which are already happening - to see if communities are safe. The neighbourhoods don’t have critical services. The water was compromised, he said, and they have to check the sewage systems. All of the traffic lights are out. Power lines are down and need to be repaired. And that has to be done before repair crews and non-emergency management can come into the city. And before residents return, they have to make sure that stores are opened, so that people will be able to eat, access medicine, and generally survive.

And the other thing, he says, is there is only one road in and out.

The premier made the decision to hold these town hall phone calls so the government could directly communicate as much information as possible.

Many questions hit on the same theme: Why is this taking so long? Danielle Larivee chimes in to say she understands. She was evacuated from her riding, in Slave Lake when a wildfire hit in 2011.

“I remember how distressing it was not to have that information,” she said. “Please know every single person working on this recognizes how hard it is for you . . . and we’re working extremely hard to get that information to you as timely as possible.”

Alex Ferworn, the academic co-ordinator for Ryerson’s Disaster and Emergency Management program, compared the town halls to Cross Country Checkup on CBC. It goes on for a long time, and yeah, some of it can be inane, but at the end, you get the sense that “you’ve mulled it all over,” and know everything there is to know.

“If you don’t have that you’ll see, ‘Hey they’re abandoning us, let’s mount a search, and that’s a bad thing,” he said.

Fort McMurray evacuee Kevin Lewis finds the town halls frustrating. On Friday, he told the Star he had yet to hear them address his concerns about small businesses. He owns a company that provides transport solutions in the oilsands and he is losing money every day. He feels like tough questions aren’t getting through.

But listening to the town halls online, difficult questions do come up.

One caller named Jeff wants to know why - with the weather being so dry and hot, and with the fire spotted on Sunday - the city wasn’t evacuated three days before. Why weren’t more resources thrown at this fire?

Chad Morrison, the wildfire manager, explains that as soon as the fire was spotted on Sunday, a helicopter and firefighters were on it.

“It went from two hectares to 60 hectares within two hours, but before those two hours were up, we had over four air tankers on it, two helicopters and 15 to 16 firefighters. We hit that thing with everything in the kitchen sink,” he said, noting that they continued to work the fire for days, and when it jumped the Athabaska River, alarm bells went off.

“Given the speed and the ferocity of this fire, that even surpassed those expectations, so with my deepest sympathies and apologies . . . what has gone on here is really unprecedented.”

Greg Solecki, who recently retired as Calgary’s manager of continuity and resilience, and managed the Emergency Operations Centre during the 2013 Alberta flood, said there is a saying in emergency management:

“When things aren’t going too well, tell everybody what you know,” he said. “When they’re going really bad, you tell them absolutely everything.”

Right now, we’re just passed the peak of the “heroic phase,” he said, where everybody bands together and supports each other, locally and across the country.

“What’s going to happen soon, there is going to be a big dip in the mental health of responders and disaster survivors, and the evacuees, and that could last months or year even.”