To the Editor,
Are we prepared for an interface fire such as those burning in the Interior or Fort MacMurray last year? I don’t think so.
Do you know what you should be doing around the outside of your house to mitigate interface fire risk? Do you know what you would take, where you would go? Or better yet, do Port Alberni City Council and city staff know what to do?
As you saw in an earlier edition of this paper (City will work on interface fire mitigation, July 13) there now appears to be some “action”, or shall we say study or the “maybe someone else will do something” attitude.
Councillors say they recognize the very real danger, but are disappointed in the lack of leadership from emergency planning. Well didn’t we ‘hire’ council to be leaders? I think we should be very disappointed in this council, and all previous councils.
Here we are in 2017, 14 years after a 2003 study and report on interface fires, with recommendations on interface fire emergency planning. Yet very little has been done here. We do have a Regional Emergency Coordinator, we do have a Community Wildfire Preparedness Plan (now in clear need of a review and update), the regional and city fire departments are coordinating their actions in cases of fire, our new fire chief has started an educational program, the Provincial Fire Response Teams are doing an excellent job and have in the last week or so responded quickly and effectively to fires in the valley, and of course we now have a ‘concerned and disappointed’ council.
Another good point is that our new fire chief, Kelly Gilday, has excellent experience and qualifications in interface fire risk, emergency response, and mitigation. Here is someone our council needs to listen to and learn from.
We need not wait for the CWPP review to be completed to start some of the mitigation actions. The Ministry of Forests web site gives clear actions required by all communities and individual homeowners. So this is not something that we ‘fire’ at the council and go back to sleep.
All of us must act. Right now we all need to go to the city councillors and demand that they get their act together. If you push on them maybe they will notice that the city is a textbook definition of interface fire risk.
The “run away and hide solution” proposed at council is not the one we should be taking. There are many things we can do, and prepare for, before we do this last resort.
Peter Finch,
Port Alberni