B.C. has never used the national Alert Ready system. Facing disaster after disaster, that might soon change

Crouched on the roof of his childhood home, Jordan Jongema clung to his dog and refreshed the dim screen on his dying cellphone and checked for updates from strangers on the murky flood threatening to swallow him up.

He'd been relying on social media for updates on the flooding rapidly taking over his parents' home in Chilliwack, B.C., leaving him and Bernese mountain dog Bowser with nowhere to escape.

"If you weren't really paying attention to social media and had the news running, there really wasn't a way to catch this," said Jonegma, 30, who was ultimately rescued by emergency crews around 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday.

Jongema is among the British Columbians questioning why the province has never used the straight-to-your-cellphone emergency communication system, known as Alert Ready, even as thousands have endured literal hell and high water conditions over and over in a single year.

The string of natural disasters in B.C. has left the province reconsidering its strategy for the program, which has so far differed drastically from other provinces.

Statistics show B.C. has not used the Alert Ready technology once since it became available to Canadian jurisdictions in 2018.

By comparison, Ontario has sent alerts more than 200 times in the last two years alone for emergencies like tornado warnings and Amber Alerts. Saskatchewan and Alberta have sent 101 and 80, respectively, over the same time frame.

B.C.'s strategy has been to reserve the system solely for tsunamis, meaning it hasn't been used during any other manner of emergency.

Not during the week-long "heat dome" that broke national heat records and left hundreds of vulnerable people dead.

Not during the brutal fire that consumed the village of Lytton in a matter of minutes, days into that same heat wave.

Not this week, during the most severe flooding the southern part of the province has seen in decades.

An alert was on the table Tuesday night when the City of Abbotsford was desperate to evacuate several hundred people still on the Sumas Prairie, fearing a critical pump station was about to fail and release a "catastrophic" amount of new water into the flood zone.

Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth said the province was "ready to send it," but the city ultimately declined, because the alert would have reached thousands more people in Abbotsford than was necessary, creating the potential for mass panic and more pressure on maxed-out emergency responders.

"They determined that no, this is not the appropriate point to use this," Farnworth said of city staff, who ultimately decided to go door to door.