Town in crisis
Jasper, Alberta, should be in the middle of tourist season right now, with people looking to experience the Rockies and National Park from a base in the widely-loved heritage town. Instead, by Wednesday 24th July 25,000 people – locals and tourists alike – had been evacuated, as fires destroyed more than half the town.
Pictures of burned-out buildings filled TV screens across the world, as firefighters were forced to withdraw from a wall of flame reportedly over 100m high, advancing 3km in just 30 minutes.
2024’s Canadian fire instances are - so far - down on the extraordinary figures from 2023, but the threat is never far away. Over 6,000 personnel responded to Canada’s unprecedented wildfires in 2023, coming from across the globe to help at a cost of $650 million. In a single week in June last year Ontario was believed to have generated costs of a billion dollars: that’s firefighting, hospitalisation and loss of productivity. All told fires in 2023 are reckoned to have cost Canada in the realm of $10 billion.
Fire, smoke and international heroism make for powerful news images, and there’s no doubt that the bravery of firefighters and other emergency responders is what stands between Jasper and a bleak future.
But what’s going behind these dramatic pictures?
Strategy
Jasper presents significant risk to responders: not just the fire itself, but the impacts of heat and smoke, the risk of accidents with machinery and vehicles, stress, exhaustion and more. All emergency response is based in an assessment of risk: Emergency Managers establish policy and process to support this, demonstrating proportionality, effective prioritisation and balancing the safety of responders with the outcomes that society demands.
Securing the health of the population, enabling the clinical frontline workers to respond as best they can, is a key part of the work of emergency managers. Up-close to the fire, the loss of healthcare facilities exacerbates the need for urgent care: whether that be from burns, accidents relating to firefighting and evacuation, or the inhalation of smoke. How will you treat people if the hospital has been evacuated or – worse still – destroyed? Emergency Managers identify key services – including those where needs are likely to surge – and ensure fallbacks and alternatives, temporary and alternative facilities, transport, staffing plans and systems for clinical prioritisation.
Evacuation
The evacuation itself is not a spontaneous process, and in likely impacted communities plans for the welfare of citizens is a huge part of the role of an emergency manager. Evacuation planning is a complex process, based in risk, and capacity and vulnerability analysis – all of which is designed and practiced in the years and months before it’s needed. It's important to be able to answer a lot of questions. Who are you going to evacuate? How? Where to? When? What happens to those people who can’t evacuate themselves because of complex dependencies? What support will people need? How will you tell them it’s time to go? How will you persuade them it’s time to go, knowing that they might never come back? And what happens to those who need to stay?
The matter of those left behind is acutely demonstrated in Jasper: the town is empty, but the TransMountain pipeline – Canada’s only west-coast petrochemical pipeline system - continues to move 300,000 barrels of oil and diluted bitumen a day through the town. Here – and at so many facilities like it – response has changed from attempting to put out the fire to prioritising and protecting critical national infrastructure.
The modern world is complex and interconnected, offering the potential for cascading disaster. In these cases, Emergency Managers work alongside the engineers and professional responders to prepare for the worst, making plans to deal with spills, pollution, fires and explosive risk, all while also working out how to maintain essentials such as power, water and gasoline.
After Fire is Out
Problems for communities aren’t over when the fire is out, and many Emergency Managers specialise in the next phase of the process, looking at the economic and social reconstruction of the area. With the population displaced, and more than half of the housing stock in the area destroyed, the community of Jasper – the social bonds and ties that provide people with so much support and security – will be in tatters. It’s not just a matter of rebuilding, but of coming to terms with increased vulnerability in a community where essential support from family and friends is suddenly unavailable.
Emergency Managers often work alongside shattered communities to help them design processes that let them mourn their past while rebuilding for the future. Sensitive work in this regard can be transformative – and Canada has powerful history here: disaster recovery expert Dr Lucy Easthope praised the innovative and thoughtful work done in Lac-Mégantic following the 2013 rail accident when a petroleum explosion destroyed the town and took 47 lives. Difficult decisions made early in the process enabled the town to find a new normality.
Whether through change in forestry management processes, the loss of indigenous knowledge, the demands of urbanisation or the impact of anthropogenic climate change, there is no doubt among experts that wildfires will form an increasing part of the hazard landscape for those in northerly latitudes. Trained and experienced Emergency Managers will continue to play a huge part in the generation of policy process and operations to mitigate and respond to these situations.
References
Alexander, D. (2005). Towards the development of a standard in emergency planning. Disaster Prevention and Management, 14(2), 158-175. https://doi.org/10.1108/09653560510595164
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Cecco, L. (2024). Canadian Rockies town Jasper badly damaged by fast-moving wildfire. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/25/jasper-alberta-canada-wildfire
Easthope, L. (2022). When the Dust Settles. Hodder & Stoughton.
Littlemore, R. (2024). The Trans Mountain Pipeline is open and it's costing me sleep. Canada’s National Observer https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/05/21/opinion/trans-mountain-pipeline-open-and-its-costing-me-sleep
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Staples, D. (2024). Images of Jasper's destruction will be seared into our memory for a lifetime. Edmonton Journal https://edmontonjournal.com/opinion/david-staples-images-of-jaspers-destruction-will-be-seared-into-our-memory-for-a-lifetime
TransMountain. (2024). Emergency Management. https://www.transmountain.com/emergency-management
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Yousif, N., Faguy, N. (2024). 'Monster' fires may have destroyed half of historic Canadian town. BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cyj423n2jdgo
