B.C. has yet to push panic button on wildfire threats

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More than a year after several extreme weather events, including a wildfire that destroyed the town of Lytton, the B.C. government has yet to use Canada’s direct-to-cellphone alerting system to warn the public of natural disasters.

B.C. has highly restrictive policies for the use of the Alert Ready system and did not deploy it at all last year, even in the face of the Lytton fire, a heatwave that killed hundreds of people in the Vancouver region and catastrophic flooding and landslides that wiped out highways and cut off access to multiple communities.

Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth responded to criticism by promising that Emergency Management B.C. (EMBC), which falls under his portfolio, would be ready to use the system in time for this summer’s wildfire season. The system can broadcast pop-up warnings and blaring alarms to all cellphones in a specific area.

But there have not been any Alert Ready messages about natural disasters this summer in the province, which has had a comparatively mild wildfire season. There have been evacuations, though, including an order that forced the residents of 500 homes near the village of Keremeos, in the southern Interior, to flee.

By way of contrast, emergency officials in neighbouring Alberta issued 10 wildfire messages through Alert Ready last year and two already this year.

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EMBC spokesman Octavian Lacatusu said in an e-mail that new protocols rely on local governments to ask for alerts, but the agency has not received any so far this year.

“The development of alerting protocols in British Columbia comes with complexity,” Mr. Lacatusu said. “EMBC now has the standardized procedures and resources for communities in place, such as the Alert Ready Submission Form, to request the issuance of an alert for wildfires and floods.”

The Alert Ready system was launched nationally more than a decade ago, and its direct-to-cellphone capabilities were added in 2018. But there are no shared standards for its deployment, and provinces have embraced it to varying degrees.

For years the B.C. government kept the system in reserve for potential warnings about tsunamis. It encouraged local governments and First Nations to come up with their own public alerting systems, including by buying commercial software to warn their populations about fires and floods. Such systems usually require residents to download apps or subscribe to text messaging services, which can leave out commuters, vacationers and of course residents who don’t sign up.

The Keremeos Creek wildfire, which has burned up about 7,000 hectares near Penticton, was discovered in late July and prompted the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen to order the evacuation of about 500 properties in the area. Those orders were rescinded last week.

Sean Vaisler, the emergency services manager in Okanagan-Similkameen, said EMBC has been clearly communicating how it is opening up Alert Ready’s capabilities.

But his region has its own mass notification system, which it has used along with police services and social media to distribute information about evacuation orders.

“In this event, cell coverage was limited in the rural areas, which played a factor in why the [region] did not request the use of the provincial Alert Ready system,” Mr. Vaisler said.

The Penticton Indian Band also used its own commercial software to keep residents informed. Chief Greg Gabriel said he did not know much about Alert Ready.

“For every band member in the community that wants to register with our alert system, they receive these messages immediately,” he said. “I really don’t know what the count [of users] is, but I know a lot of band members have registered.”

Before 2018, Alert Ready’s “broadcast intrusive” technology could only take over TV and radio signals. The cellphone-alerting capabilities amounted to a profound upgrade of the system.

But policy patchwork surrounding the technology is only starting to be addressed. An ongoing public inquiry in Nova Scotia is probing why police officers were completely unfamiliar with Alert Ready in 2020, when a gunman killed 22 people in an overnight rampage in the province.

Police have since pushed for better access to the system, including in B.C., where they have sounded Alert Ready a total of four times already this year. One alert involved a missing child, and the three others were related to a gunman who shot four people, two of them fatally, in Langley in late July.

EMBC records obtained by The Globe and Mail under freedom of information laws show that staff prepared a draft last year of a potential alert for a wildfire in Lytton in the event of an evacuation order, but the Alert Ready message was never sent because it was not policy at the time.

“I have created a template just in case we need to issue a [broadcast intrusive] alert for an evacuation order for the Lytton area,” wrote civil servant Beverly Duthie.

“I think we would have to consider very carefully the use of such a BI alert without prior briefing and approval,” replied operations manager Brendan Ralfs. He added: “I appreciate that you have proactively developed the template but please do not use it.”

The e-mails were exchanged on June 17, 2021, when EMBC was monitoring a wildfire threat to Lytton. That threat faded, but a wildfire ripped through the community on June 30, destroying most of the town and killing two people.

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