By Chris Marsh
“Can you call us from somewhere private?”
I felt sick. On the line were staff members from British Columbia’s Water Stewardship Division – a part of the provincial Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. Our team – made up of staff members from the City of Grand Forks and the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary – had opened an Emergency Operations Centre in Grand Forks ahead of predictions of historic flooding in the Boundary Region of British Columbia. We had been holding out hope that the flood waters would be moderate, that maybe the worst we would see would be property damage and some short-lived evacuations. But that was not what was going to happen.
“It’s going to be bad. You could see a 1 in 200 year return – or worse. We’re expecting the peak in about 8 hours.” They were friends and colleagues we trusted, and the tone in their voices told us everything we needed to know.
A 1 in 200 year flood in the Boundary meant that hundreds of homes would soon be underwater. Businesses would suffer enormous damage. Critical infrastructure would be destroyed. The best we could do was to try and get people to safety, implement emergency measures where we could, and start preparing to repair the damage that the flood waters would cause.
It’s not easy for an emergency manager to hear that events are going to happen that you have little control over. That good people are going to get hurt. We composed ourselves and talked briefly about how we would tell the others, and prepared to deliver the news to a room of dedicated professionals. Those professionals, over the next weeks and years, would devote countless hours to helping those impacted by flooding.
They would spend long hours in an Emergency Operations Centre, undertaking challenging and thankless tasks; they would staff one of BC’s largest and most effective recovery teams in history; they would face an angry public, who would ask how we could let this happen and what would be done to ensure it never happened again; and they would see flood-related work in all aspects of their professional lives – from the person asking about taking flood debris to the landfill, to the people hoping to have their homes and property purchased by the government – broken and financially destitute from the loss inflicted on them by the flood water.
And, in that moment, feeling like an imposter, I asked myself, “How the hell did I get here?”
I came to my emergency management role in the way that many people have – before there were many dedicated post-secondary training opportunities. Two weeks after my eighteenth birthday, I joined a volunteer fire department in my hometown in rural Alberta. A few weeks later, I climbed aboard a fire engine to respond to a grass fire – lights and sirens on of course – and it changed my life forever.
That first grass fire was the start of a public service career that has continued, for me, to this day. I spent ten years with that fire hall, and have been with three others since then. I was a search and rescue volunteer for a while and tried on dive rescue for size. In my professional life, I chose a career around environmental science. I spent 18 years working in the air quality monitoring field, measuring the concentrations of harmful pollutants in BC communities. But I never lost my taste for emergency response and that intangible rush of adrenalin when a bad thing happens, and you get to be someone trying to make it better.
In 2007, I started a position in the Emergency Management BC TEAMS organization. TEAMS stands for Temporary Emergency Assignment Management System. It’s a way for a small provincial ministry, like EMBC, to access provincial resources during times of emergency. My organization – the Ministry of Environment – agreed to share its human resources, like me, when disasters would strike in BC. I worked from a Provincial Regional Emergency Operations Centre (PREOC) in Nelson for the most part, when needed. I supported the EOCs working at the local government level – helping find resources and provide support when they were overwhelmed. And I loved it.
I was one of the first staff members to attend the PREOC when a landslide struck the small community of Johnsons Landing, on the east shore of Kootenay Lake. The report we received from a provincial landslide specialist who flew over the slide to assess it was chilling. “There are houses that are missing –they are just gone. This is the biggest slide I have ever seen.” That event saw the tragic loss of four lives, and a community was forever changed by a natural disaster.
I decided, then and there, that I wanted to focus my skills and abilities to help people impacted by disaster.
I completed my Emergency Management Certificate at the Justice Institute of BC in June of 2017, working through the courses and assignments however I could while working full time, gathering experience through my time with the TEAMS program at EMBC, and my paid on-call firefighter position with the Kootenay Boundary Regional Fire Rescue service.
In September of 2017, I was hired as a full-time Manager of Emergency Programs with the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary. And, nine months later, our EOC staff team would order 3200 people from their homes, in advanc_e of the worst flooding in modern BC history.
The field of emergency management can be very intense. It’s hard work. It ranges from the tedium of report writing and policy development to full-blown panic when a natural disaster strikes. At times it feels as though your skills and passion go underutilized. However, you never have to wonder if the work you are doing makes a difference or has an impact on your community. The effort put into preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery activities are all critical to the resilience of your community. Inevitably, all of the hours spent preparing yourself and those you interact with for emergency response will be utilized, and in that moment, you will know that all of your training, education, skills development, relationships, and leadership will be needed – and it will have been worth it.
Bio: Chris Marsh is the Recovery Manager, Boundary Flood Recovery, Regional District of Kootenay Boundary, British Columbia.
Read this story to learn more about the recovery process in the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary: http://haznet.ca/recovering-worst-bc-flooding-modern-history-story-teamwork-cooperation/
