Jasper mayor says community preparedness key to safe evacuation

The mayor of Jasper, Richard Ireland, speaks with Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins about the evacuation of his community caused by recent wildfires.

Michael Higgins: As you understand it, what is the current threat to the community?

Richard Ireland: Well, the most significant threat is a very large wildfire south of town that is still approaching the southern boundary of the town. Parks Canada are out there with assistance from other firefighters from the province and from other national parks across the country, and they're assisted with aerial support as well. But it is a very aggressive wildfire, really quite large, and still bearing down towards the town – so a significant threat for our entire community.

MH: The aggressiveness of this fire is certainly a big point in this whole discussion. So if we dial back the clock, your thoughts on what it took to safely evacuate such a large number of people from your community, especially considering so many were tourists.

RI: I think it speaks highly, both to all of the individuals who became the evacuees. People have been encouraged to take up incentives to be prepared over the last number of years, starting many years ago with other wildfires in Alberta. The sense, at least for residents, of 72-hour kits and having their documents already organized and ready to go: water and medications and all that stuff. We have really been aggressive with our messaging on that. And for our own residents, I think the uptake was stupendous. For visitors, I can only be somewhat incredulous at their ability to be so responsive, to hear the message and then to comply. The evacuation order came quite quickly on the heels of the evacuation alert. That, again, was just a testament to the really dynamic nature of this particular fire that caused the threat. People had hours to get out, approximately 25,000 people in total. Only one exit route from all of Jasper remained, because of fires north and south of the town, and all of those people safely evacuated beginning – unfortunately – at 10 o'clock in the evening and through the wee hours of Tuesday morning. But everybody got out safely with no significant incidents at all.

MH: Now you're the mayor of a community within a national park, a national park that is within the province of Alberta. How challenging is it to navigate that dynamic in an emergency situation like this?

RI: I suppose many looking from the outside would see that as a challenge, and in some respects it is, but it is our reality. And so we have worked closely with all of those agencies over a number of years and particularly with respect to emergency response and wildfire preparedness. We have held practice scenarios with all of the involved agencies, so that includes Alberta Emergency Management, Parks Canada and our own municipal team. And plans have been coordinated in advance how we're going to deal with this. We have gone into something called Unified Command. The fire is on the landscape, so Parks Canada, as having the expertise in wildland fire management on the landscape, take the lead on that, but we're all in at the same table. We had response from Alberta Emergency Management in our town in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and the level of cooperation and coordination is extremely high. So I can appreciate from an outside perspective you look at all these multiple jurisdictions all in one location and wonder how it will work. Well it works extremely well, because these people are professionals, they've trained for this, they're prepared for this, they know how to cooperate with each other and how to get the job done.

MH: What about coordination with the tourism sector, their need to get all their guests, their own staff moving. How much of a partnership is there with the hospitality industry?

RI: It is significant and critical to our needs. And so for the evacuation itself, we had hotels in the tourism industry become centres for the accumulation of people who needed to then get on buses to get out of town, who might not have had their own transportation. We have rafting companies and tour companies who have access to buses, and those buses were made available. Whatever residents and businesses within the community could do to assist appears to have been done. We had anecdotal evidence at least of residents helping each other and helping visitors. The degree of patience that was exhibited, the degree of preparedness, and responsiveness and just kindness to each other was quite staggering. And yes, the tourism industry steps up as they typically do to help us manage all the visitors that we rely upon through the rest of the year.

MH: It was an Alberta Emergency Alert that prompted the evacuation Monday evening and then a follow up to clarify reference to a five-hour window. What played out in that regard?

RI: I'm not entirely sure. I acknowledged that there was an error in some wording but it didn't impact negatively the evacuation at all. And so, although it may have caused a heightened degree of anxiety among some individuals thinking that the fire was perhaps closer than it actually was, at least in time, as soon as that error was recognized, it was corrected. That took about 50 minutes. But given the nature of the emergency, you can appreciate the first fire, north of town, was detected sometime after 7:00. Within half an hour, there was reports of a second fire south of town. Within another 10 minutes, another report of another fire south of town. And at the same time there was a forest fire already burning in the National Park which was being actioned by Parks Canada. So they were already spread quite thinly. This was a very dynamic, actively evolving situation. The timing between the emergency alert, the state of local emergency and the evacuation order was a really short timeframe. So yes, we acknowledge a mistake was made, but in the overall context it didn't cause damage. We still got everybody out safely.

MH: A majority of evacuees had to head west. Thoughts for your municipal neighbors across the border who rallied around welcoming hundreds, if not thousands of people?

RI: Valemount gets our credit for their response. I think I heard from the mayor in Valemount that they had about 16,000 unexpected visitors Monday night and Tuesday morning for the evacuees from Jasper. They responded as well as could ever be expected and beyond. So a very small community, smaller than Jasper, but they took up the challenge and served our guests and our residents extremely well and we thank them for that.