Emergency events are more complex and are “crossing and blurring” intergovernmental boundaries, Calgary’s emergency management committee heard.

The Calgary Emergency Management Agency (CEMA) delivered its 2023 annual status of emergency preparedness report to members of the committee on Feb. 8.

CEMA Chief Sue Henry outlined a busy year for the agency, with most of the time spent on response and recovery-related deployments. Chief Henry said the Alberta wildfire season started early, and that required the deployment of firefighting resources across the province. Canada Task Force 2 – based in Calgary – filled 79 incident management positions across Alberta last spring. 

Later in the summer, when wildfires hit the Northwest Territories and more than 22,000 people fled their homes, more than 4,000 came to Calgary relief centres.

“(It was) An incredibly complex response that crossed provincial and territorial boundaries while calling on our service to meet the needs of many vulnerable people that came to Calgary,” Henry said.

That response activated the Emergency Operations Centre for 25 days. Along with 4,000 people, 223 pets joined their owners at 50 hotel sites (more than 5,000 rooms used). More than 12,000 transit tickets and 7,000 meal vouchers were delivered to evacuees, Chief Henry said.

That kind of cross-border response is one factor in the bumped-up complexity of emergency response, said Henry.

“The events that we’re responding to also are becoming more complex events are interwoven with societal, technological and environmental factors,” she said.

“They’re crossing and blurring jurisdictional boundaries between communities. This complexity is demanding that we take a multidisciplinary approach, leverage expertise from various sectors, and incorporate advanced technologies for better prediction, communication and mitigation strategies.”

Henry also said that given the impact of a changing climate, they can’t rely on past events to assess the risk of future disasters.

“Climate change brings about more frequent events, longer in duration events and severe weather events,” she said.

Lesson learned from 2023 responses

Ward 7 Coun. Terry Wong asked Chief Henry about the key lessons learned with the cross-jurisdictional response to the NWT fires.

One big lesson was the rollout of the emergency social services programs, said Chief Henry.

“We have a lot of work to do through 2024 to align that program to be able to handle a very, very large, very quick influx of folks that we had,” she said.

“We have to do some work on our registration system to make sure that we’ve got a little bit better track of where people are. We’ve got a paper-based system right now, which not necessarily the best system for us.”

Committee chair, Ward 8 Coun. Courtney Walcott quizzed Chief Henry on the dozens of external partners and their role in handling larger capacity events.

“Do you end up having a feedback loop of our capacity, just to help with future preparedness,” Walcott asked.

Chief Henry said it’s a balance they struggle with, especially when the Emergency Operations Centre is open for 54 days. She said it’s a draw on both City of Calgary staff and the social services agencies.

“We had a lot of conversations throughout the summer months about what it was doing to them and how they were stretched for resources and how we could support those pieces,” Chief Henry said.

“So I would call that very much an ongoing conversation, but it’s something we have to be very cognizant of when we do open the EOC and we do respond to other jurisdictions for support.

Outside council chambers, Chief Henry acknowledged the complexity of response and the responsibility of Calgary as a major city in the region to help puts a strain on resources. She said, however, it’s a challenge for the staff to look at how to respond in different ways.

“Every time we respond, we learn something that we can then put into the Calgary context to make us stronger from Calgary,” she said.

She did say that when they provide response in a jurisdiction beyond Calgary, they are reimbursed by other orders of government.