Communications breakdown: 2022 Hope wildfire provides lessons

Communication struggles and a lack of experience in dealing with wildfire emergencies could have had serious repercussions if last year’s wildfire near Hope had spread faster.

That’s one of the takeaways from a post-fire review of last year’s fire response and comments from those who participated in it.

The review says more work needs to be done to prepare local governments and officials for when wildfires threaten their communities.

Last September, a fire broke out on a steep mountainside just west of Hope, near the rural community of Laidlaw. (Laidlaw is the flat floodplain area surrounding the Highway 1 commercial truck scales.) The fire prompted evacuation alerts and orders for properties in Laidlaw and also closed Highway 1 for a period of time. The fire’s location in extremely steep mountainous terrain made it almost impossible for wildfire ground crews to fight.

Fortunately, the blaze never damaged any structures before it was finally extinguished by cooler, wet weather.

Three months after the fire, a dozen people involved in the firefighting effort gathered in a room to talk about what worked, and what didn’t.

The province had given the FVRD money to conduct an “after action report” on the response to the fire. With a consultant co-ordinating the meeting, staff from Hope, the BC Wildfire Service, the FVRD, Chawathil First Nation, and Abbotsford’s emergency program shared their thoughts on the response. They were joined by Hans Mulder from the Laidlaw Ratepayers Association, a community association of Laidlaw residents.

They didn’t agree on everything, but the now-completed report and the participants’ candid comments suggest that poor communication and a lack of emergency experience by some involved in the response created significant challenges during the fire, including when evacuation alerts and orders were being issued. The report will be used to try to avoid last year’s pitfalls and better plan for the next blaze. (The report doesn’t explain who said what, instead providing a broad list of problems encountered, successes, and recommendations.)

The response was particularly fraught with confusion because although the fire triggered evacuations over a relatively small area, that small zone included land overseen by three different governments: the FVRD, the District of Hope and Chawathil First Nation. Each was responsible for evacuating its own residents, while the BC Wildfire Service was in charge of all firefighting activities.

That led to confusion and uncertainty, the report said. Two participants cited difficulties in co-ordinating the release of public notices. Several participants said it took too long to produce evacuation notices once the decision was made to issue alerts. A couple people pointed to the lack of wildfire-specific evacuation templates available at the time—though evacuation orders are usually focused on providing information on how to evacuate, not on communicating specifics of the current emergency situation.

Much of the review is concerned with challenges in co-ordinating and communicating between the different government bodies. It also suggested communication difficulties between officials within some governments and agencies, including Chawathil First Nation.

The report also indicated that the small local governments involved in the response continue struggle with a lack of expertise and knowledge about how best to respond to emergencies.

Some local officials and respondents did not understand the role played by provincial agencies like the BC Wildfire Service and Emergency Management BC. One participant declared they were unfamiliar with the way wildfire responses differ from responses for other emergencies. There was uncertainty about what local emergency centres do specifically when the BC Wildfire Service is leading a fire response. And at least one official wasn’t sure who did what at the BCWS.

Those knowledge gaps continue to persist. When the report went to the Fraser Valley Regional District board of directors, the director in charge of the Laidlaw area, Bill Dickey, said he was unfamiliar with the BC Wildfire Service.

Dickey said he thought the Ministry of Forests was in charge of fighting fires. “Now it seems like it’s the BC Wildfire Service. Who are these people?”

In fact, the BCWS is a longstanding branch of the Ministry of Forests. They have been the public face of the province’s wildfire efforts for close to a decade.

Mulder, the Laidlaw Ratepayers representative, told The Current that the wildfire revealed some of the same communications and bureaucracy problems that had first surfaced during the atmospheric river events in 2021, when landslides to the east and west of Laidlaw cut the community off from other communities.

Mulder said that the Fraser Valley Regional District’s lack of emergency resources was a problem during the fire, just as it had been during the atmospheric river.

Mulder added that local governments community organizations like his continue to have difficulty accessing federal and provincial funding sources.

“They make these announcements, but then getting access to these dollars is virtually impossible for the local authorities.”

He also said wildfire officials could make better use of community-level information when making evacuation decisions.

“The local knowledge is a big gap for all these organizations that are trying to remotely manage crises,” he said.

The point of the report, of course, wasn’t to cast blame, but to discover all the difficulties that occurred last year and develop strategies to prevent them from happening again. It also looked at what went well during the fire and since.

The staff and operator of the Hope Airpark, which became a home base for fire response efforts, were soluted for their flexibility. And a Chawathil First Nation’s representative declared the meeting an important step in identifying improvement opportunities—including within their own organization.

The review’s findings are hardly surprising: the need for better communications between agencies and with the public is a constant theme in post-disaster reports in BC and elsewhere.

And the experience and knowledge gap among local government workers had already been made clear by the 2021 atmospheric river. Because BC’s emergency response system demands that local governments take the lead, day-to-day workers are often required to perform duties outside their normal expertise. That inevitably can lead to confusion and uncertainty.

At a recent meeting, FVRD staff said they agree with the report’s recommendations and that the organization has obtained funding to provide training for emergency operations staff.

The report’s findings suggest they shouldn’t be the only local government looking to make sure their workers actually know what to do—and who’s in charge of what—the next time disaster strikes.