PG better equipped to deal with complexities of wildfire season than in 2017: Spooner

The City of Prince George is attacking the 2024 BC Wildfire Season from all angles.

A lot has changed in the planning stages after welcoming in 11-thousand evacuees from across the Cariboo in 2017 – over 5,500 of which were taken in by complete strangers.

Tanya Spooner, Manager of Emergency Programs told MyPGNow.com that if our city sees a similar influx of evacuees this year, they have a number of large buildings to draw from.

“We are incredibly fortunate in Prince George. We have a lot of big facilities and we try and maintain relationships with them year-around and there is always a plan. It is a little bit hard sometimes because those plans change and which one we are going to work off of is really dependent on the actual event, the time of year and what else is happening in town.”

“If something larger was coming, we would start off by trying to use the facilities at Exhibition Park, either the CN Centre or one of the Kin Buildings. If that wasn’t available, we would then work with our facilities department to see what our best alternatives our.”

In 2017, the College of New Caledonia and Northern Sports Centre were utilized to house those displaced from the Cariboo wildfires.

The blazes around Williams Lake and the Elephant Hill blaze caused over $127 million dollars worth of insured damages.

On July 7th of that year, a state of emergency was declared by then Minister of Transportation, Todd Stone, making it the first state of emergency in 14 years at that time.

This year, the city is taking steps to streamline the process including a permanent location for its Emergency Reception Centre as well as adding four trailers set up at the back of the Kin Centre.

Spooner noted each trailer will be used to perform specific tasks – one of them will be acting as the reception centre where personnel will be available to complete evacuee registration and referrals for essential needs such as lodging, food and, clothing.

“We also have what we would call our Remote Mutual Aid facility and that is really a call centre that allows people that are outside of Prince George to sign on at one of the other reception centres, giving their number for a callback and then calling them from Prince George to register them remotely.”

Another trailer will act as a cultural activity centre, which will be available to evacuees and First Nations if they need a place to have a community meeting or a Town Hall.

Currently, roughly 90 evacuees in connection to the Parker Lake Wildfire near Fort Nelson have settled in the northern capital, with another 1800 taking shelter in Dawson Creek and Fort St. John.

Now, if Prince George had to evacuate due to an encroaching wildfire, Spooner’s preference would be to have sections of the city leave instead of everyone heading out all at once – this of course would be dependent on where the fire is located and what type of danger it poses to property and human life.

“If Prince George were to ever evacuate, number one, my hope is that it would not be the entirety of the community. If a portion of the community such as the Hart or College Heights were needing to be evacuated, we can try and accommodate those individuals within Prince George before sending them out of town.”

“But, if for some reason we had a major catastrophic event and the entirety of Prince George needed to be evacuated, we would be looking into our neighbouring communities for support and what was happening to give specific directions and to what direction to go.”

If a mass evacuation did occur in PG, residents would likely be spread out across various centres such as Kamloops, Kelowna, Vancouver for example Spooner stated to MyPGNow.

She also urges residents to have the Service BC app downloaded on their phone to access any direct deposit payments and other services.

As for what the city would do if wildfire evacuees came from Fort McMurray, Spooner stated any assistance would come from the provincial operations centre and appropriate ministries on who and what we can support.

“We would be looking to them for direction and guidance on how they would want us to proceed with that,” added Spooner.

Speaking of Fort McMurray, an evacuation order has been issued for several neighbourhoods in the northern Alberta city as a wildfire creeps ever closer.

An Alberta Emergency Alert rang out Tuesday afternoon for those in the Beacon Hill, Abasand, Prairie Creek, and Grayling Terrace neighbourhoods, with nearly 250 kilometres of Highway 63 now closed to general traffic to clear the way for evacuees heading south.

The fire, approximately 96 hundred hectares in size, is roughly 15 km southwest of the closest city boundary, with hot, gusting winds hampering fire crews’ attempts to contain the blaze.

The rest of Fort McMurray and surrounding areas remain under evacuation alert.

Eight years ago, a massive wildfire tore through the city forcing the evacuation of  90-thousand people in the area to evacuate, and destroyed 24-hundred homes and businesses.