Christine Whelan FEO, November 23, 2023, VOL. 5 ISSUE 6
Can you survive 72 hours during an emergency?
As we approach the first anniversary of the Christmas storm, Elliott, many minds are focused on bringing a plan to the Greater Fort Erie area to better inform and empower each household and the community as a whole.
Fire Chief, Mark Schmitt, shares how the Fort Erie Fire Department, the Town of Fort Erie and the Canadian Niagara Power (CNP) have, and continue to, put a collaborative plan and tools in place for potential weather events.
Mark has been Fire Chief since August 2022, just giving him only a few months to sink his teeth into the role before stepping up to one of the leaders in battling Elliott. Both Schmitt and his deputy, Christopher Smith, were fairly new to their roles.
“The Fort Erie Fire Department has been talking about emergency preparedness throughout the year. The public education team has been handing out information whenever they’re in the public and we were on a local radio talk show in the spring,” the fire chief shared.
When asked about the residents who weren’t prepared for Elliott, Mark responded, “I think the ones who weren’t prepared were probably the ones who had a standby generator and were caught off guard by the fact that their air intake froze up and they lost their ability to run their generator. So, I think the vast majority of the truly somewhat stranded were those who relied on their generator to provide them with power to keep them warm and safe.”
He added, “There were a number of other people who just thought it would never happen to us.”
The message from Fire Chief Schmitt is, that even though you have a generator, also have a Plan B. He heard, around 60-70% of the standby generators froze up during that storm.
Everyone in the Greater Fort Erie area plays a role in emergency preparedness. It’s a system of two parts, working together as a whole.
PART 1 – The First Responders
There is a collaboration with the Fort Erie Fire Department, Canadian Niagara Power (CNP) and the Town of Fort Erie. Schmitt remarked, “We meet frequently with CNP to talk about preparedness and share information.”
Websites
Mark announced, “The Town launched a new website this year. There is a page dedicated to emergency planning. Join the email emergency list. You can subscribe to that page to get updates.
Go to forterie.ca and Search Emergency Planning.
“Right at the top, it asks, ‘Can you survive 72 hours during an emergency?’ Below is where you can join the email emergency list. When we have a weather event, the communication team will be able to push out email blasts as a means of getting information out.”
The page also talks about the 72-hour planning, what that looks like, along with a checklist and other helpful links.
The CNP website will have information about emergency preparedness. All relevant web pages will be interconnected with each other’s links.
“The municipalities and the Region got together and created an emergency preparedness video in the springtime. It was launched during Emergency Preparedness Week.
“We’ve updated the radio stations you can listen to, here in Fort Erie,” Schmitt said this information, as well as all other points needed, will be included on the postcard that is going out to the public.
72-hour Preparedness Kit Postcard
“The communication group with the Town has put together a 72-hour preparedness kit card.”
The postcard is in the Fort Erie Observer and at the fire station. CNP will also have postcards at their location, 1130 Bertie Street, to hand out to the public.
Learning From Elliott: Communication Is Key
“The big one, we all know, during Elliot, was the communication piece. It was very difficult because of the power loss and the cell towers going down. We’ve been brainstorming on new ideas of how we can get information out to people.”
The fire chief stated that through the Niagara Region, there is a group that is willing to set up a network using ham radios in case of an emergency situation. The Town’s infrastructure trucks now have more portable radios.
The municipalities and the Region have partnerships for such times where they can help each other with communications, Mark says.
Something else Mark said they learned from Elliott, “We now know to pull people off the roads earlier. We had many people stranded.”
He noted, “One of the things we noticed when we were pushing things out through social media, which seemed like the only method we had at the time during Elliott when we were trying to tell people to stay put, stay at home, there was a lot of negative feedback to that. But once we started hearing what the Town and CNP were doing to restore things, we got more positive feedback out of it. This was one of those learning experiences, if we want people to stay home, we need to also share with them what we are doing and what we can’t do because of the conditions so that people have a better understanding of what is happening.”
Selecting specific words was significant in, “Getting that information out in a way that people understood the dire conditions that we were in. I used the term, ‘life-altering’. I told people going out during that time could be life-altering. I got some pushback on that but truthfully, if we look to our neighbours south of us, they experienced a number of deaths because of the storm, so it truly could have been a life-altering event for people.”
In recalling, “It was the perfect storm. We got the terrible winds that we typically get. We have the localized flooding that we can get from time to time on top of blizzard-like conditions. Volunteer staff sacrificed a lot over that time when most people just wanted to be at home with their families.”
PART 2 – Community Participation
While the first responders prepare their roles in case of an event, Fire Chief Schmitt encourages each household to have its own plan. “Certainly, Storm Elliott proved to us that residents need to be 72-hour prepared, as well as have the ability to charge cell phones and laptops so you can still stay in communication.”
While talking about the 72-hour kit, Mark recommended, “When putting the kit together, it can be quite costly. That’s why we started pushing the information out early so people could start gathering their supplies early and gradually. Things like water and food supplies, first aid items, enough medications to ensure a supply at home is available during the emergency.”
We discussed how some camping supplies can be used in emergency situations like huddling in a dome tent in the living room at night can help keep a small family warmer for sleeping and a propane stove pulled out onto the front porch during the day can heat up food and drinks.
“Have an emergency contact list written out so if your phone does go down and you’re borrowing somebody else’s phone, you have the numbers.
“I recommend that anyone with a standby generator also have a spare air filter with instructions on how to replace it. Additionally, I suggest having a minimum of a 500-watt/hour standby battery for charging devices or running small appliances.”
Know Your Neighbours
Schmitt says, one of the most important points of a plan is, to know your neighbours. “One of the messages I was trying to push out there during the storm was, rely on your neighbours and support one another.”
He remembers being a kid when, during a storm, the neighbours got together, taking care of one another, shovelling each others’ driveways, making sure everyone had enough food, specifically checking on the elderly in the area.
Referring to current times, “Being somewhat of a bedroom community, some of our neighbourhood connections have diminished.”
Marks encourages, “It’s a good time right now to build those connections with the people who live close to you. Why not have a chat about it with them? ‘Are you ready for a storm?’ What does that look like?”
He told a story of a couple he ran into at the emergency shelter during the storm on Christmas day. They had come in to warm up, get some information and get cell service so they could reach out to family, letting them know they were safe. The man told Mark they had an old-school gas fireplace that didn’t require power to run at home and had brought in a group of neighbours who were all huddled in that one room with the fireplace.
We spoke about the number of newer residents in town and how many of them are not connected with their neighbours. Now would be a good time, the fire chief suggested, to reach out to a new neighbour.
Once all the items are collected and in place, the fire chief suggested that households then challenge their 72-hour kit. He encouraged, “It might be a good idea to pick a Saturday night, shut down the hydro and play some board games out of your kit.” He added, that depending on how much you test your kit, don’t forget to replenish.
You can find the Town of Fort Erie’s web page about the 72-hour plan by going to forterie.ca and searching Emergency Planning at the top of the Home page.
Mark also suggested a helpful page called Be Prepared for an Emergency by Emergency Management Ontario. This page also provides information on how to build a 72-hour kit. You can find this page at: ontario.ca/page/be-prepared-emergency
Once preparedness is in place, it’s important to not let the worry and stress of a potential storm rob us of our happiness and productivity. Remember what is important. Family, friends, moments to remember, goals to achieve. The preparations are not meant to be dwelled upon, but rather to ‘have in place, just in case’, then continue to focus on what is important. Life.
