“Be Prepared” is Prescott-Russell’s emergency motto.
The well-known Scout motto has become the watchword now for emergency planning for Prescott-Russell municipalities since the 1998 ice storm raged across Ontario and Québec.
“The government woke up,” said Dan Holmes, the community emergency management coordinator (CEMC) for the region. Holmes serves as the CEMC for both Champlain Township and Alfred-Plantagenet Township. He provides consultation services on emergency management planning to other municipalities within the Prescott-Russell region.
He remarked on how the provincial government’s overall attitude towards emergency preparedness in Ontario, at all levels, changed in the aftermath of the Ice Storm of 1998. “They made emergency management mandatory for every municipality,” he said.
Holmes himself was living in Hawkesbury during the 1998 ice storm. At that time, he worked for Air Canada in a different capacity. For the past several years now, he has been CEMC for the two townships and a consultant to other municipalities. During this time, he has researched the differences in emergency preparedness prior to and since the ice storm.
Before 1998, he noted, not all municipalities in Ontario had their own emergency and disaster strategy. Those that did had a general idea of how to react in an emergency. There was also no guarantee that any municipality with an emergency plan made a habit of doing practice drills to make sure it was effective.
That situation changed following the 1998 ice storm. The provincial government revamped its regulations dealing with emergency preparedness from top to bottom. It also demanded that all municipalities have their own emergency management strategy.
Such strategy included written guidelines on dealing with an emergency, the set-up of an emergency program committee (EPC) and a control group (ECG), and designating a CEMC. “By December 2004, everybody had to have all those things,” said Holmes, “and they had to conduct regular exercises and training (scenarios).”
A training exercise did not require declaring a pretend state of emergency and sending fire department, paramedics, police, and others to a location where they would pretend to deal with a crisis situation. There are “table-top” exercises available now for a variety of emergency situations for the members of the EPC and ECG to sit down and run through during a meeting. Much of these table-top exercises consist of rapid-fire questions to each member present demanding their reactions to and responsibilities for an emergency scenario. “These (table-top) exercises are very effective,” said Holmes.
He cited the 2006 gas explosion in the Vankleek Hill area as an example of the improvement in emergency preparedness. The community’s handling of the crisis earned it a public commendation from the Ontario Fire Marshal’s Office.
“We’re definitely better prepared to manage and deal with it (emergencies),” said Holmes, adding that emergency management plans now undergo regular review and revision.
“People know their roles and their responsibilities. We’ve made the system more robust. People take it seriously now, at all levels of government.”