Gillies Township debriefs storm response as northwestern Ontario braces for more winter weather
CBC
As northwestern Ontario braces for another potentially harsh weather week, officials in the township of Gillies, Ont., are coming up with new storm contingency plans after power in the community was knocked out for days last week.
A weather system rolled through northwestern Ontario during the middle of last week. Soon powerful wind gusts and wet, heavy snow created a recipe for disaster.
"I was actually pleasantly surprised that so many people were self-sufficient," said Wendy Wright, Reeve of the Township of Gillies.
"We always are asking people to have 72-hour emergency kits, that kind of thing at home. But we're quite lucky that the temperature was mild. If this had been -30 C with this going on, it would have been quite a different story," she said.
Township council will be holding a regularly scheduled meeting Monday night, and Wright said the storm and outage response will be debriefed.
She said contingency plans need to be created for scenarios where outages happen in even harsher and much colder weather.
The outage prompted township officials to organize volunteers and the volunteer fire department to go door-to-door, making sure people were safe and had any supplies they needed. A state of emergency was also declared Friday, which has since been lifted.
"That's just too long for people, so luckily everyone was safe," said Wright.
Wright said all residents were checked on Friday, as volunteers also struggled to get around on the rural roads.
Another barrier in the storm was the loss of cellular reception, further isolating some community members.
"Not that many people have landlines anymore, right. I have one here. The fire chief has one … Maybe more people will get one now," said Wright.
Wright said power outages are definitely not unusual in the rural community, which is located about 35 kilometres west of Thunder Bay, but she said this outage was the longest she's seen during her tenure as township reeve.
The weather is also only becoming more volatile as the climate changes, which is forcing many municipalities to rethink their responses to preparedness to significant weather events.
In fact, it's possible that harsh weather might not be over for the winter just yet.
Windsor-Essex, Chatham-Kent and Sarnia can all expect between 20 and 40 millimetres of rainfall this weekend.
More Alberta seniors are now eligible for a provincially funded RSV vaccine.
More than 100 workers at a steel plant in eastern Ontario are being laid off either temporarily or permanently, as a company with facilities in Quebec and Ontario cuts its workforce due to challenging market conditions — including U.S. tariffs.
A small town northwest of Thunder Bay, Ont., has become the unlikely home for hundreds of foreign workers, but many may have to leave the community they've embraced after the end of a federal program put in place to fill gaps in Canada's labour market.
There's mixed reaction in Waterloo to an injuction allowing police to detain, arrest and charge anyone who is participating in unsanctioned street parties in that city this weekend.
Diabetes Canada is excited about Prince Edward Island's new pharmacare deal with the federal government, but hopes the province will reevaluate copays on diabetes supplies, says a senior manager with the organization.
After 26 years of accommodating guests from across the world, Faith Embleton says she and her husband Ken are ready to sell their bed and breakfast.
A group of big-name companies including Google, Meta and Dow have signed a pledge to support tripling the world's nuclear energy capacity by 2050, a signal of the technology's growing resurgence in popularity.
Five years on, Toronto-area doctors and public health officials are looking back at what they've learned since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and most agree the early experience will prove useful if the city faces another infectious disease crisis.
City staff would like Londoners to take a good look around their home and ask themselves a direct and possibly difficult question: Could everyone in your family survive at home, without leaving and with no other help, for a full 72 hours?
Liberal Leader Mark Carney will officially become Canada's next prime minister within a few hours, taking the reins as the country barrels toward a general election and continues to fend off verbal and economic attacks from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Recent cyberattacks in Newfoundland and Labrador should have been a wake up call for the federal government about the reality of an increasingly hostile world, says one cybersecurity expert.
A recent CBC News analysis found that Nova Scotia is rapidly losing some of its most affordable apartments, but housing experts say there are ways to prevent that.