How does COVID-19 rank on city’s list of vulnerabilities?

The City of Ottawa keeps a ranking of all the bad things that could befall the municipality as part of its emergency management plans, including public health emergencies like the COIVID-19 crisis. So where does pandemic rank?

The current list dates back to 2016 and, according to emergency management head Pierre Poirier, the list is scheduled to be renewed this year.

Here’s how it works.

The province requires the city to go through an annual analysis of a “hazard identification risk assessment,” which informs the list of rankings, called the vulnerability assessment. The province’s emergency management plan defines vulnerability as: “the susceptibility of a community, system or asset to the damaging effects of a hazard.”

The vulnerability rankings take into account the frequency, probability and consequence of the hazards and the city’s response capabilities.

Data from the hazard assessment also comes with mitigation factors, Poirier said.

“As an example, a rail emergency may be mitigated by a decrease in the number of trains, a reduction in carrying dangerous goods, or new technology (such as) collision avoidance and automatic braking systems,” Poirier said. “These mitigation factors would result in a reduced vulnerability to the City of Ottawa.”

There are 53 disasters on the city’s list, grouped by severity. They are categorized as extreme, very high, moderate, low and very low.

Past reports to city council have described how the rankings help management prioritize human resources, equipment purchasing, training and public education programs.

Three disasters currently sit in the extreme category.

The top-ranked vulnerability for the city is freezing rain. Anyone severely impacted by the 1998 ice storm probably won’t argue with that ranking. Rounding out the extreme hazards are earthquake and snowstorm blizzard.

Pandemic appears on the list in the moderate category, ranked 16th overall, while epidemic appears in the low category, ranked 28th.

It might suggest the city wasn’t prepared for something like a wide-sweeping public health crisis, but Poirier provided insight as to why pandemic, which has worldwide impact, and epidemic, which has more of a community impact, ranked far down the latest list when it was created about five years ago.

“The (hazard identification risk assessment) and vulnerability assessment are done at a point in time and reflect professional accumulated evidence, data and opinion,” Poirier said. “In 2015 and 2016, there were few influenza-like illnesses impacting the world in a significant way. Ebola was contained within Africa and there was not a heightened sensitivity to pandemics.”

Poirier said the city has some control over the evolution of an epidemic, but less so for a pandemic. “Consequently, a pandemic is ranked lower in the hazard assessment and higher in the vulnerability assessment,” he said.

According to Poirier, the city and Ottawa Public Health have been prepared for epidemics and pandemics. The health unit maintains a pandemic blueprint called the interagency influenza pandemic plan and the document feeds into the larger municipal emergency plan, he said. It could be interesting to see how the pandemic informs the city’s next vulnerability analysis — an assessment done every four or five years.

The city’s first vulnerability analysis was done in March and April 2003, during the SARS outbreak. It was also just after Canada recorded its first case of West Nile virus infection in Ontario in 2002.

No wonder, then, that “infectious disease outbreak” came out as the top-ranked hazard in the 2003 vulnerability analysis.

However, by the time the 2011 analysis rolled round, infectious disease outbreak was knocked out of the No. 1 spot and, in fact, didn’t appear in the top seven hazards listed in a city report. The No. 7 hazard that year was listed in the report as “public health.” No. 1 that year was earthquake.

City emergency management reports illustrate how the rankings change over time, but some hazards have regular appearances.

Earthquake was among the top hazards in 2003 and 2011. Ottawa is in what Natural Resources Canada calls the Western Quebec Seismic Zone, where, according to the department, earthquakes happen every five days on average.

A city report on the 2003 vulnerability analysis sums up why earthquake is a top hazard: “in the event of an earthquake, the impacts will be varied in nature and spread over a large area, making response coordination difficult.”

The city, like the province, has declared an emergency over the COVID -19 outbreak. The last state of emergency in the City of Ottawa was last spring, related to flooding along the Ottawa River. The latest vulnerability assessment has urban flood and riverine flood ranked in the moderate category at eight and 17, respectively.