When brutal storms strike, some rural areas can't cope, municipalities say
Francophone say they should be able to intervene in local service districts after dramatic weather

CBCNews.ca
June 30, 2017
Elizabeth Fraser

Francophone municipalities are calling on the New Brunswick government to let municipalities take responsibility for nearby local service districts during major weather calamities such as the 2017 ice storm.

The ice storm in January was a "chaotic" event for local service districts on the Acadian Peninsula, said Luc Desjardins, president of the Association francophone des Municipalités du Nouveau-Brunswick/

"In municipalities, they know their territory, they have means to intervene, they have plans in place," said Desjardins, who is also mayor of Petit-Rocher. "They have the personnel that's going to help."

During the ice storm, local service districts in the Lamèque and Shippagan areas did not have the resources to assemble volunteers or set up shelters, he said.

"There was nobody responsible to take care of them except for the Department of Local Government," he said. "But there's only one employee for the whole peninsula that's taking care of them." 

In the new regional municipality of Tracadie, meanwhile, nine shelters were quickly set up for people who lost power during the storm.

At its peak, the ice storm that started in southern New Brunswick on Jan. 24 and spread to the northeast the following day left 133,000 homes and businesses without electricity. About 200,000 customers lost service at some point as a result of the storm.

Two people died and 45 people were taken to hospital because of carbon monoxide poisoning, in most cases from the use of generators or barbecues in garages or homes.

On Thursday, the municipalities group released a 28-page report offering 22 recommendations to improve emergency measures if a similar disabling storm happens again.

"If we had a big freeze after the storm, like -30 [C] or something, we would've had maybe hundreds of deaths on our hands," Desjardins said. "The temperatures stayed really warm and that helped people not to die in their homes."

He said the Emergency Measures Act already allows the minister, in consultation with municipalities, to give responsibility to municipalities to intervene when emergency conditions exist in adjacent local service districts.

"We want the minister to look at that, we want to have a committee set up and see who would be involved and the cost that would be shared," he said. "That would at least put on the field, a system of intervention that is lacking right now."

A responsibility to help

With climate constantly changing, Desjardins said, he hopes the government will respond to the request before next winter.

After post-tropical storm Arthur in 2014, a committee was established to make recommendations for future storms, but it was dissolved, he said.

"We want to have real action after the study is going to be made public," Desjardins said. "This time it was in the peninsula but it could be anywhere else."

He said the association is pushing to have all areas of New Brunswick formed into municipalities, adding that 85 per cent of the province does not identify with a municipality.

 

"[This] is like Middle Ages for modern society," he said.