While some local municipalities have emergency-alert systems and some don’t, Tuesday’s tsunami warning has many local officials looking at how best to react should it happen again.
At the Capital Regional District, members of the planning and protective services committee recommended Wednesday that the board seek more information about the situation.
“We asked staff for a report on the incident and any steps that need to be taken in order to improve response and co-ordination,” said Oak Bay Mayor Nils Jensen, a committee member.
Saanich Coun. Colin Plant suggested the committee ask staff to explore options for establishing a regional emergency notification system, but members instead decided to ask for a broader review that could include moving to a more co-ordinated approach.
Plant argued there is value in looking at an emergency notification system separately.
“Yesterday we saw five different electoral area and municipal responses that were text-based,” he said. “You had others that were the conventional ones where they put them on their website. They activated their Twitter.”
Plant said he didn’t want to see the issue of the notification system lost in a broader approach.
“If this was to happen again in a month, and I’m obviously no prognosticator, I would like to think that we at least looked into a better notification system even if all of the co-ordination of how we would respond has not been totally changed,” he said.
Jensen said Oak Bay has plans in place that help deal with things such as Tuesday’s event.
“We have a rigorous protocol to deal with disasters and impending disasters,” he said.
It begins with the fire department monitoring the system and issuing an alert if needed, Jensen said, but in this case it was determined that step wasn’t necessary.
“We have a number of tools that we use and it’s co-ordinated with the police,” he said. “We can use sirens, loud-hailers and door-to-door notification.”
The municipality already knows which houses are at greatest risk, Jensen said.
“They’re mostly on McNeill Bay and in the Willows area,” he said. “We were certainly ready to go in both of those areas.”
As a precaution, a facility for displaced residents was set up at the Oak Bay Recreation Centre, staffed with volunteers and an employee.
Oak Bay has an emergency-preparedness session — organized before the tsunami warning — coming up Feb. 21 at 1 p.m. at the Monterey Centre.
Metchosin, which has a notification system, will assess its response to the tsunami warning at a Monday meeting, set for 7 p.m. at Metchosin Municipal Hall.
Sooke will review what happened at its 7 p.m. council meeting Monday at Sooke Municipal Hall.
Colwood Mayor Carol Hamilton said her municipality is working on putting something in place to respond to incident’s such as Tuesday’s warning. “We don’t have anything per se for the time being.”
She said establishing an alert system is being tied in with a website update and other measures.
“The province is supposed to be coming out with a direct alert in April, so there’s a lot balls in the air around all this.”
Colwood had people going door-to-door evacuating low-lying homes in the early morning of Tuesday, but talk of using sirens has her concerned, Hamilton said.
If sirens had been brought out Tuesday, there could have been hundreds or thousands of people flocking to find help and not enough resources to accommodate them, she said.
Hamilton said many things have to be considered in creating a program.
“I think it has to be a multi-pronged approach,” she said.
The system could be linked to technology and possibly connected to phone land lines, Hamilton said.
In Esquimalt, Mayor Barb Desjardins said the municipality does not have its own notification system.
“We have the opportunity of having the Department of National Defence siren in our community,” she said. “That siren has been something that our community has grown to recognize as a system of warning, but it is not necessarily a system of warning.
“The challenge is how do we work closely with the Department of National Defence and rectify that in some way?”
As well, municipal staff is looking into the prospect of “piggybacking” onto the existing Vic-Alert system run by the City of Victoria, Desjardins said.
Almost 50,000 people signed up to the Vic-Alert system on Tuesday, joining the 6,500 who had done so earlier.
Sooke Mayor Maja Tait, whose municipality does not have such a notification system, said measures that are technology-based do not reach people who are not linked to text messaging or social media.
