McDougall Creek Wildfire

Image Credit: FACEBOOK/Denise Russo

There's no question that Emergency Operations Centre volunteers had a tough time handling the 11,000 or so people fleeing the McDougall Creek wildfire last month.

A bottleneck was created by so many people looking for help in a very short period of time. It shows how the response system is not set up for the mass evacuation events that are becoming all too common in BC, Canada and the world.

“Once we’re out of the incident completely, we’ll start looking back and look at what did work and what didn’t work and what could we do better next time,” Emergency Operations Services supervisor Jason Bedell told iNFOnews.ca last week. “That’s going to involve conversations with the province.”

Since that interview, Premier David Eby announced he is going to set up an expert task force on emergencies to provide advice on volunteer recruitment and to ensure support for evacuees is more accessible.

READ MORE: B.C. premier announces task force on climate emergencies on tour of wildfire disaster

Bedell has worked in the public safety realm for 20 years and just took on the supervisory role, which is a new full-time position, in mid-July, less than a month before the McDougall Creek wildfire.

“The speed at which these evacuations had to occur, that’s probably the worst I’ve experienced,” he said. “That was very intense. That weighs on us all. That weighs on the volunteers, the fact that we have people waiting for support. We all feel that.

“We want to get through and help people as fast and as efficiently as we can but we have to use the system we have right now. That’s through the province. That’s the conversation we’ll have once we’ve reviewed this program. Does this work for mass evacuations?”

The Central Okanagan program has about 50 volunteers who take a number of courses through the Justice Institute and take part in training sessions about once a month.

Mostly they’re on call to respond to things like house fires that always seem to happen in the middle of the night.

On Canada Day, they jumped into action when 450 homes were evacuated because of a wildfire on Knox Mountain in Kelowna.

Then came McDougall Creek.

Not all 50 were sitting down and registering evacuees – a process that takes about 45 minutes per family. Some had meet-and-greet assignments while others focused on things like resource acquisition, all crucial elements in making the system work.

The province did step in, when asked, and quickly trained another 25 volunteers and staff to help with the processing. That didn’t instantly boost the registration ranks but it did give Bedell a chance to send some people home to rest after working 16 to 17 hour days.

“These are volunteers,” he said “These are people in the community. We had volunteers who were doing this while their homes were on evacuation order. They didn’t know if their homes were lost to the fire. It really speaks to the dedication of the volunteers that we had here that they were willing to put in such long hours while they themselves were dealing with the incident on the home front.

It also meant they had to put up with a certain amount of abuse from a small portion of really frustrated evacuees.

“Not everyone is going to handle it in a cool and calm manner,” Bedell said. “But most people were very respectful. They understood the challenging circumstances and, frankly, there were long waits.”

It’s too early to tell whether the experience will sour some of the volunteers on emergency response or make the keener. And it’s too early to say if the 25 new trainees will continue on.

“All the volunteers I’ve been speaking with, I think they handled this with a lot of professionalism," Bedell said. "They know this is a very difficult time but it’s also why they’re here. It’s why they chose to volunteer.

“They are the pillars of community who want to stand up and help their fellow community members. I think that’s absolutely commendable but it’s difficult. It weighs a lot on you. We’re dealing with people who, at some times, it’s the worst day of their lives. They’ve just lost everything.”

That being said, this event could be a turning point in emergency response in BC, just like a deadly slide on Philpott Road east of Kelowna changed the Central Okanagan’s emergency response system in the early 1990s.

READ MORE: How a deadly slide in Kelowna saved homes in a wildfire a decade later

That slide, which killed Charlie Philpott and his family, was outside city limits which made former Kelowna fire chief Gerry Zimmerman and others realize that a regional response system needed to be created.

The Central Okanagan was the first in the province to set up a regional system and, Zimmerman said, and it helped a decade later when regional officials had to work together to save homes during the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park wildfire. That fire destroyed 238 homes and a winery, and forced the evacuation of more than 33,000 people.

The McDougall Creek wildfire may be another such watershed moment.

No details have yet been released on the makeup of the new provincial task force. Given the problems faced by Central Okanagan response teams, Bedell seems a logical choice to have a seat at that table.

To contact a reporter for this story, email Rob Munro or call 250-808-0143 or email the editor. You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom and be entered to win a monthly prize draw.

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