Emergency chief lands top job as COVID'S second wave hits
Sue Henry's life took an unexpected turn at the campus gym.
It was 1998, and she was at the University of Victoria with plans to become a phys. ed and math teacher. But then she noticed walk-ups at the gym to take the physical fitness test for wildland firefighters.
“I happened to have my gym bag with me and passed by the door, and thought, `OK,'” Henry said.
She hadn't been preparing for the trial, which tests whether you can handle the heavy equipment and physical demands of front-line firefighting. But Henry passed and got a job offer shortly after.
“I was a lot younger then,” she said with a laugh.
Later that year, Henry was on the ground fighting the massive Silver Creek wildfire, which forced 7,000 people to flee their homes in Interior B.C. And by 2001, she was back home in Calgary working for the fire department.
It wasn't what she'd seen for herself, but Henry said she now can't imagine doing anything else.
“We go into some of the worst days of people's lives,” she said. “There's something really impactful about that ... part of the job requires that we make very quick decisions, sometimes without all the information we need to make it.”
Now, Henry, 46, is helping lead Calgary through the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic as the new chief of the Calgary Emergency Management Agency (CEMA). She's been a CEMA deputy chief since 2015, but she took over the top role this year just days after spiking coronavirus infections prompted a new round of publichealth restrictions and the city declared a second state of local emergency due to the pandemic.
It's not exactly an ideal situation for starting a new job, and Henry said she's been through “the busiest days of my life” since she officially became chief Dec. 1. But it's not all new — she's been in the city's emergency operations centre since the pandemic started, helping co-ordinate Calgary's response and communicate with the public about what they need to know.
“The last thing I do before I go to bed at night is reading about the pandemic, making sure we're all co-ordinated. The first thing I do when the alarm goes off in the morning is the same,” Henry said.
Before the pandemic, the city had only ever declared a state of local emergency during the 2013 flood, and it lasted just two weeks. The first COVID-19 state of emergency this year started in March and lasted into June, and the latest declaration has already been in place for a month.
“It's one of the few disasters we've responded to where it impacts every single person,” Henry says.
She's in a different situation than her predecessor, Tom Sampson. Much more is known about the coronavirus now compared with nine months ago, but COVID-19 has also hit Alberta much harder this fall and winter. At peak, active cases topped 20,000 across the province, the number of people in hospital has soared beyond 800 and, some days, dozens of new deaths are reported.
So far, Henry hasn't issued any new city orders, which she has the power to do under the state of local emergency. Instead, she said she's mostly making sure Calgary is keeping up with orders handed down by the provincial chief medical officer of health, clarifying how the city should respond and keeping Calgarians informed about what they need to do.
That's been especially true as a little more than a week into Henry's tenure as chief, the province announced the most stringent restrictions since the spring, with a wide variety of businesses required to close and much stricter limits on gatherings.
But the first stages of vaccinating Albertans to protect them from COVID-19 are also underway. Henry says the city will help co-ordinate that, too.
And that offers some hope for eventually lifting the pandemic state of emergency for good.
“I know it's been hard for a lot of folks, but if we can just hang on for a little longer, this city has an incredible spirit and I know that spirit will stay.”