Yellowknife never had a plan for a city-wide evacuation
CBC
The City of Yellowknife did not have a concrete plan for a full-scale evacuation of the N.W.T. capital before it was forced to put one into action last month.
"We were absolutely ready with our shelter-in-place plan. The whole concept of evacuating the entire city of Yellowknife is not something that's contemplated in our emergency planning, nor actually in the GNWT's [Government of Northwest Territories], either," acknowledged city manager Sheila Bassi-Kellett, in a news conference on Monday.
The city's weeks-long evacuation order will be officially lifted on Wednesday afternoon, meaning about 22,000 people will be making their way back home from Alberta, Manitoba, B.C., the Yukon and elsewhere.
In the weeks and days before the territory ordered the evacuation of Yellowknife, Ndilǫ, Dettah and the Ingraham Trail on Aug. 18, city officials said that if a wildfire threatened Yellowknife, the plan was to move people from the most at-risk sections of the city to other areas of the city, with the multiplex serving as an evacuation centre for those displaced.
That makes little sense to Alain Normand, who teaches emergency management communication at York University. He said a shelter-in-place plan wouldn't work in the case of a wildfire.
"You're keeping them in the zone where the fire is," he said, adding that the city's initial plan didn't consider deteriorating air quality.
Normand, who followed Yellowknife's evacuation in the news, also said that based on Yellowknife's geography and the growing intensity of wildfires, it was almost a given that Yellowknife would one day be threatened by a large-scale fire.
He said a city as remote as Yellowknife should have had a plan in place, and that plan should have been made public.
Yellowknife resident Sukhmanpreet Dhindsa said that by the time the city's evacuation alert went out on Aug. 15, for only the western parts of the city, she had lost all faith that the local officials had control of the situation. The city-wide evacuation order was then announced the next day.
"When the evacuation did come, it was very obvious that they didn't have a plan," Dhindsa said.
"In the future, I will have no confidence with the city and the [N.W.T. government] with any sort of evacuation or emergency management."
In the spring and earlier this summer, Yellowknife Mayor Rebecca Alty said the city's emergency plan didn't get into specifics because there were "so many different scenarios" that could affect an emergency response.
"There's so many different variables that would go into it," she said in an earlier interview with CBC News. "It's about having an evacuation framework and working through that."
Alty said in a brief email to CBC News on Sept. 1 that she wouldn't be available for an interview on the evacuation strategy until after the city's governance and priorities committee meeting during the week of Sept. 25.
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