In August 2005, Katrina, a huge, powerful, Category 5 hurricane, hit the city of New Orleans. In the chaos that followed, nearly 1,400 people perished. The emergency response of the city, state, and federal governments was unfocused, delayed, and not terribly effective.
New Orleans had an award-winning emergency response plan.
Only a handful of agencies came out of the aftermath of Katrina with full marks—the Coast Guard, the National Weather Service, and particularly the National Hurricane Centre, praised for its accurate and timely forecast of what was about to hit the Gulf Coast.
Katrina was a massive emergency with a lot of moving parts and overlapping jurisdictions. It’s not hard to imagine how the response fell short.
But what about smaller emergencies? How do we judge governmental or agency response to those?
In 2012, Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW) staff prepared a provincially-mandated Hazard, Risk and Vulnerability Assessment. It identified 32 hazards that “could affect the Resort Municipality of Whistler.” They were rated Very High to Low, explaining, “no municipality has unlimited resources allowing them to plan for every hazard event possible, therefore some form of ranking is required when deciding which hazards are most important to plan for.”
Five hazards were ranked high-risk: earthquake, interface fire, water-supply interruption, minor snowstorm, and volcano.
To date, the body count from all five is zero.
In a listing of Whistler’s emergency history, there are only two events in which lives were lost: The 2003 “Rain on Snow Event” that washed out the Rutherford Creek Bridge, killing five people when their vehicles plunged into the creek; and the 1995 Quicksilver lift failure that resulted in two deaths and 10 injuries.
On Dec. 4, 1999, Whistler legend and pioneer Seppo Makinen froze to death in his camper. There were assorted factors—and some speculation—that contributed to Seppo’s death, but hypothermia was the ultimate cause.
Nowhere in the list of 32 hazards is the one that occurs virtually every year, sometimes more than once a year: extremely cold weather. Not as attention-grabbing as, say, volcanic eruption—the most recent one having occurred more than 2,300 years ago—and not to say the others aren’t important, but the lack of inclusion of potentially fatal cold weather is a bit of a head scratcher, since Seppo isn’t the only cold weather-related death to occur in Whistler.
So why isn’t extreme cold on the RMOW’s radar? Maybe that’s because we are a mountain community, a resort mountain community. And Canadian. Hey, it gets cold here. Deal with it. Or, perhaps as Nancy Reagan would have said, “Just get a coat!”
Or is it the muni simply doesn’t want to deal with cold weather? I mean, who really dies of cold? Poor people? Underhoused people? People living rough? Homeless people? Our people?
The fact is the RMOW has abdicated any responsibility and, seemingly, interest in hosting a cold-weather emergency shelter. This was demonstrated when temperatures most recently dropped down to dangerously cold levels. Not only did the muni pass the responsibility off to the Whistler Community Services Society (WCSS) to deal with the emergency, their ability to respond with basic, necessary supplies was hampered due to their cache of emergency supplies being located in a frozen-shut Sea-Can!
But wait, I hear you say, wasn’t this sorted out a little over a year ago when the RMOW decided they’d open the library as an emergency shelter when the temperature dipped below -20 C?
That was so 2023, dearies. Get with the program. This is 2024.
That first iteration of the RMOW’s Extreme Cold Weather Shelter Plan only ran until the end of March, 2023. C’mon. Why might we need it again?
The muni remained intransigent on how cold was too cold, insisting on -20 C notwithstanding the province’s Assistance to Shelter Act pegged the temperature at -4 C. And since their largesse ran out the end of last March, they never bothered to either renew or replace the plan with something more permanent.
So it fell to the WCSS to open its doors for overnight guests. Problem was, the demand was greater than the maximum supply previously agreed to by the fire chief. But whereas the manager of protective services might not have been able to thaw out the Sea-Can, the fire chief was urged to see if maybe the capacity at WCSS might not be nudged up a bit.
Rearrange office furniture, slip in a few more cots, buy a few more pillows and, voila, more room in the manger. Full marks to the fire chief for stepping up and providing timely, helpful action.
Interestingly, the RMOW’s Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan—up for review and revision this year—lists all the government and external agency support groups the town might rely on for help in emergencies. There are 11 “Local Partners” listed, including the Salvation Army, WAG, Whistler Transit, WSAR, and School District 48.
Not among those local partners? WCSS!!
While the RMOW was trying to thaw out their emergency supplies, WCSS was stuffing people into their managers’ offices, paying for hotel rooms for some, running the food bank, providing outreach services for residents needing help, underwriting counselling services and assisting many locals with their own, unique emergencies.
And you know who those people seeking shelter from the cold were? If you guessed homeless tramps, you’re wrong. They were local employees. The people local businesses so desperately need to keep their doors open. The people who help keep the “resort” in our resort municipality.
Section 8.1 of the Plan says, “During emergency events, Mayor and Council need to make themselves readily available to come together and consider and approve bylaws, emergency resolutions, or a declaration of a state of local emergency, if necessary.”
Italics, mine.
Section 8.2 says, “The [Chief Administrative Officer’s] office serves a coordinating managerial role to assure the continued operation of municipal government services.”
The cold-weather emergency has passed, thankfully. Even my frozen-shut garage door opens again. But it was forecast well in advance. Everyone knew it was coming. Vancouver opened up many additional spaces. Other municipalities did the same.
Ours punted. No one who was supposed to be readily available or coordinate things did. Perhaps it wasn’t an emergency. Perhaps it wasn’t the kind of emergency the town wants to deal with. Not nearly as sexy as a volcano, eh?
Or perhaps the RMOW is just so tied up in rules and plans and bureaucracy it simply can’t respond to even the most foreseeable, most frequent, most prosaic of emergencies.
I’d sure hate to see what happens in a big emergency.
