Enterprise councillor says N.W.T. needs a better wildfire warning system

Michael St. Amour was at a pancake breakfast last summer when he saw the wildfire's flames in the distance and knew it was time to get out of Enterprise, N.W.T.

"I was telling the people to start packing their things and leave," he said.

St. Amour, a hamlet councillor who was the mayor at the time, and the rest of council ordered an evacuation in the early afternoon of Aug. 13.

Hours later, the approaching wildfire destroyed most of the community. 

As the N.W.T. prepares for another potentially devastating wildfire season, St. Amour said there needs to be better communication in the event of future evacuations and that there should be multiple avenues for this information to be shared. 

Accounts of that afternoon and the ensuing night have been detailed in the past by residents of Enterprise, Hay River and Fort Smith, who fled in confusion as communication networks went down, darkness fell and flames burned across the highway.

Cars burned. Livestock and pets died. By some stroke of luck, there was no known loss of human life.

Members of the community drove through the chaos with little public information on where they should go and what lay ahead of them on the road.

One of the only lines of communication many of them had were the radios in their vehicles.

St. Amour said the government should take more advantage of this medium when trying to get information out quickly during future events. 

It's something other wildfire-threatened areas of the world already do.

In Australia, for example, the state and territorial governments use their public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), as an emergency broadcast system, sharing immediate updates with the public. 

St. Amour said he'd be in favour of the N.W.T. exploring something similar.

"They need to do that, but they need to not wait-and-see type thing," he said, adding if the fire had hit the community one day earlier, the situation could've been fatal on a large scale.

"If it would've been Saturday morning, we had 700 people at our jamboree in Enterprise. That would've been a whole other mess that we would've lost lives, if that happened on Saturday," he said. 

According to the N.W.T. alert website, emergency alerts can be sent by television, radio and wireless devices, although this is different from the continuous, updated information an emergency broadcaster could provide.

Last year, official evacuation notices did sometimes go out on N.W.T. airwaves — but some featured garbled pronunciation that made them difficult to understand. Other notices were delivered to communities by letter or created more confusion.

Emergency Communications Protocol being 'revised'

CBC News reached out to the territorial government about using local radio stations for emergency broadcasts.

Jennifer Young, a spokesperson for the N.W.T. government said in an email that local authorities are responsible for their own communication tactics related to an emergency, which would be in the community's emergency plan.

She said if the Territorial Emergency Management Organization is activated to respond to an event, the tactics employed will be dictated by the level of severity of the event, "with a focus on utilizing the GNWT website and social media sites as the main source of timely and factual information during an emergency."

Young said the territorial government also has a process for community governments to request their evacuation orders be issued on NWT Alert so the messages can be pushed to radio, TV and cellphones. 

Young said the Emergency Communications Protocol Annex to the NWT Emergency Plan is being revised to better articulate the government's approach to emergency-related communications.

"Communications tactics that will be employed could include but not be limited to: web, social and radio."

The Australia example

Theresa Rockley-Hogan says a couple years ago, her job didn't exist. 

She's an emergency broadcast lead with the ABC, where she co-ordinates a team of about 12 permanent staff (a number that doubles in the summer months), broadcasting information about extreme weather events. 

Each state or territory in Australia controls its warnings around fires.

"So they're all different, but they all have an agreement that they will issue a warning in a similar way," she said. 

Rockley-Hogan said as an emergency broadcaster, there's an agreement with the government that they will broadcast messages that are important to the public if an emergency situation is arising. 

"We guarantee that we will broadcast the warnings regularly and we use the official warning. Sometimes they're terribly written," she said with a laugh, "because they're legal, legalese."

They will often translate the information into a message that is easier to understand and then broadcast it. There are taglines used on the radio — "ABC Radio bush fire information" — to let the public know it's an emergency broadcast. 

The warnings range from "advice" informing them that there is a potential emergency in their area, to "watch and act," meaning that there's a heightened threat and people should start preparing, and then the highest level, which is "emergency."

"Watch and act" is broadcast every thirty minutes and "emergency" is broadcast every 15 minutes.

The system started because of fires, but now other weather-related events — like floods — are being included, although which incidents make the cut to be broadcast depends on the jurisdiction.

'Canada and Australia have different systems'

Chuck Thompson, a spokesperson for CBC, said Canada has a National Public Alerting system that enables emergency management organizations across Canada to issue alerts about imminent or possible dangers as well as Amber Alerts.

"Canada and Australia have different systems," he wrote in an email.

"Emergency alerts are created and sent by authorized emergency management organizations, such as police departments, Environment and Climate Change Canada, as well as provincial and territorial bodies."

He said when an alert is issued, it is broadcast on television and radio and sent to mobile devices that are connected to an LTE (long-term evolution) network.

"Therefore, if the N.W.T. issues an emergency alert, all last mile distributors — including CBC — must pass through the alert."

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is responsible for regulating and supervising Canadian broadcasting and telecommunications.

"In the event of an emergency, emergency management organizations (e.g., provincial/territorial governments, police organisations, etc.) are responsible for issuing emergency alerts and deciding which communities should receive them," wrote Leigh Cameron, a spokesperson for the CRTC.

Cameron said that radio and television stations (including the CBC), cable and satellite providers, and wireless service providers are required by the CRTC to broadcast alerts.

"In addition to distributing public alerts, the CBC is expected to maintain local, regional and national news broadcasts during an emergency."

Enterprise finds its own solution

St. Amour said when the communication networks were knocked out, the leadership and law enforcement was forced to rely on a few homes with Starlink satellites to communicate. 

"Starlink saved our asses, basically," he said. 

He said the community now has about a dozen Starlink units ready to go in case a fire ever comes through again.

"We're good to go even if the power lines go down," he said.

St. Amour added he hopes the territorial government is taking similar measures to ensure no community is left without a warning in the event of an approaching natural disaster.