Medicine Hat declares local state of emergency in aftermath of storm
By medicinehatnews on October 18, 2017.
NEWS PHOTO TIM KALINOWSKI
Downed trees and powerlines a theme throughout the city as Hatters pass through fierce windstorm earlier this evening. Pictured: Medicine Hat News office was not spared as two large trees nearly fell on building and cars in parking lot. Thankfully, no major damage or injuries resulted.“The items that are listed on the City of Medicine Hat website (pertaining to the storm) are key,” says Brown. “So those safety issues related to downed power lines and trees. We would also say to try to stay off the streets a little bit here throughout the night.”
Brown said emergency officials were “on top of” the situation, and were being well-co-ordinated by the Emergency Operations Centre, which was activated at 7 p.m. to cope with the effects of the storm.
“We were monitoring events throughout the day,” explains Brown. “We identified the event escalated to a point where we needed additional co-ordination between our departments. If you look at it from the operational level, some of the challenges we’re facing are obviously the power outages, small fires across the city and downed trees which have created traffic issues.”
Brown says the city decided to declare a local state of emergency because the problems emergency responders are facing are so widespread, and it could access additional resources from the province by making such a declaration.
“The local state of emergency allows us to have the authority to make decisions, and these authorities allow us to pre-plan in advance, and allows us access to resources that may not necessarily be available, i.e.. those resources from the province.”
Brown says the city should have some idea on Wednesday on where the condition of infrastructure stands and what steps need to be taken moving forward toward the recovery effort.
“We don’t necessarily have that full damage assessment completed yet,” states Brown. “We are working that through our recovery plan to give us a sense of what that full damage is. We’re very much in that response phase right now; so when we do go into that recovery phase that will be something we take a closer look at.”
3-2
