As you can see in the image at the top of this page, downtown Campbell River may be flooded sometime in the decades to come. At the 2019 Disaster Preparedness Trade Show, Chloe Swabe explained how the city is planning for sea level rise.
Continue reading Campbell River Is Planning For Sea Level RiseBy Roy L Hales
Twenty or more years ago, BC Ferries gave preference to trucks delivering food to Cortes Island. The volume of traffic has increased since then, especially during the summer months, but this service is no longer available. The truck servicing Gorge Harbour Marina Resort missed 17 out of 19 ferries this summer, while watching cars that arrived more than a half an hour later drive onto the ferry. At the October 25, 2019 Quadra/Cortes FAC Meeting, Bill Dougan, General Manager of Gorge Harbour asked BC Ferries to provide assured loading for commercial vehicles coming to Cortes Island.
Continue reading Assured Loading For Commercial Vehicles(This is the third in a series of articles from the 2019 Campbell River Emergency Preparedness Trade Show.)
By Roy L Hales
People in the remote indigenous communities surrounding Vancouver Island occasionally wait days before they can access the advanced medical facilities in Vancouver. According to David Carsen, of Land Forest People Consulting, “Air ambulance does the very best they can … [but] there is only so many machines and, from time to time, they are not able to respond.” Patients in Kyuquot, for example, have been forced to make a 6 – 8 hour trip to Campbell River by ambulance. Homalco Air Rescue is a First Nations initiative that will provide much needed evacuation and medical transportation service in less than an hour.
Continue reading Homalco Air RescueBy Roy L Hales
This mornings program is the beginning of a series about the 2019 Disaster Preparedness Trade Show, held in Campbell River’s Thunderbird Hall on Friday , Oct 18, 2019. The room is filled with a smorgasbord of stories, ranging from oil spill clean-ups, to a First Nations helicopter rescue initiative and much more. You can find them in in the halls 21 booths and four free public education sessions. One of the organizers told me this is Shaun Koopman’s day. Shaun is the Strahcona Regional District’s Protective Services Coordinator and he is behind this public introduction to the emergency response community.
Continue reading Campbell River’s 2019 Disaster Preparedness Trade show(The second in a series of articles from the 2019 Campbell River Emergency Preparedness Trade Show.)
I was immediately drawn to Western Canada Marine Spill Response Corporation (WCMRC) booth. This company founded in 1976 and cleans about 20 spills a year. Most of these are relatively small, like the incident in Gorge Harbour, Cortes Island. I was more interested in the fact they cleaned up the big spill in Burnaby, during 2007 – which gives us some insight into what a major bitumen spill on the West Coast of British Columbia might look like.
Continue reading The Big Spill
