With the help of Holistic Emergency Preparedness & Response, Emergency Management BC, RCMP and CVRD staff, Cowichan Tribes held a mock wildfire emergency at IR5-Riverbottom on Friday for educational purposes.
The drill included evacuation orders and the launch of Emergency Social Services and an Emergency Operations Centre.
“The purpose was to test our training and test processes and some lessons learned that we could implement in trying to develop an emergency response for our community,” Cowichan Tribes councillor Stephanie Charlie, the Emergency Response Team’s director, explained after the drill.
Charlie noted the band had created a community emergency response plan in the early 1990s but all of the trained members from that time have moved on to other things. And, with the ever-growing threat of natural disasters, like earthquakes and wildfires, the time is right to make sure the community is prepared, she said.
The size of the team now depends on the type and severity of the emergency.
“Right now most of our team is staff. We have reached out to some of our community members who are interested in being part of the response too,” Charlie explained. “They’ll be getting training…I think ideally we want to have some members on each of the reserves here, we are seven reserves here in Cowichan Tribes and we are spread out quite far so to have somebody who is able to respond in that area trained, that would be ideal for getting information out quickly.”
Now that initial training has been completed, Charlie expects follow-up training to continue for specific response situations.
“It’ll be ongoing training with mock emergencies,” she said.
Cowichan Tribes members can feel safer knowing this type of work going on, Charlie confirmed.
“I definitely think that they’ll feel a lot safer and at ease knowing that there’s some kind of plan and that we are planning for some safety response for the members if something happened.”
sarah.simpson@cowichanvalleycitizen.com
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