Iqaluit fire chief convinces city to revise emergency measures plan

Luc Grandmaison, director of emergency and protective services for the City of Iqaluit, says the city must set clear guidelines on how it will respond to specific emergency and “peacetime disaster” situations. (PHOTO BY PETER VARGA)

The City of Iqaluit deals with its share of public emergencies every year.

And Luc Grandmaison, as head of the city’s emergency and protective services department and fire chief for the city, has already worked through some of Iqaluit’s biggest disaster situations in his first three years with the city.

Among them were an extreme, but short blizzard in January 2014, the city’s summer-long dump fire later that year, and a 42-hour lockdown to an entire neighbourhood last month, which police imposed during an armed standoff.

All situations ended safely without casualties, thanks in part to the city’s emergency management plan.

But that plan, as Grandmaison recently told city council, April 28, is incomplete and out of date.

Starting this month, in response to Grandmaison and a request from city councillor Kenny Bell, city administrators will renew and shore up Iqaluit’s emergency management plan, which dates to 2010.

“Each emergency plan has what we call contingency plans,” Grandmaison told Nunatsiaq News.

“Each threat, each situation the city might face, should have a contingency plan on how to deal with it.”

The city’s plan lacks guidelines on how the city should act in response to specific scenarios, he said.

Scenarios could include anything from hostage situations, large power failures, floods, and epidemics, to experiences more common to Iqaluit such as blizzards lasting several days, and dump fires.

“If you’re asking me, do we have a contingency plan for the dump fire? No.

“Should we have one? The answer is yes, because we have dealt with it before,” Grandmaison said.

“What’s missing in our plan, is [different] types of emergencies we might be faced with,” he said, as well as a guide on how to “mitigate specific emergencies, and return to normal operations.”

Before it can add scenarios and create contingency plans for each one, the city must first reconvene its Emergency Preparedness Advisory Committee, which is headed up by the city’s chief administrative officer.

The committee last met in the summer of 2014, under Iqaluit’s previous chief administrative officer, John Hussey, when the city was dealing with the dump fire, Grandmaison said.

The committee will meet again under the city’s newly-hired CAO, Muhamud Hassan, who is just one month into the job.

The advisory committee brings together a broad range of public, private and government agencies that handle law enforcement, health care, transportation and key facilities in the city related to power generation and emergency shelters.

The CAO’s first task is to update the contact list for all these agencies, which dates as far back as 2010.

“That is something you need to update on an annual basis, to make sure everybody’s still there,” Hassan said. “I was not here when the team was put together, and obviously some of the committee members have moved on.”

Grandmaison recalled that the committee started working on risk assessments and contingency plans for different emergency scenarios in 2012. It will continue this work once it reconvenes.

The committee’s work will build on the city’s emergency measures program by mapping out action plans in response to “specific situations” the city could face.

Some priority scenarios the city should consider include the case of a dam break at the power plant and emergency responses needed in the case of blizzards lasting several days, Grandmaison said.

“We need to write out beforehand, specific situations we might be exposed to,” he said, “so that anybody that plays my role will look to the tab that says ‘landfill fire’ — and see in the first eight hours, this is what we should be thinking about.”

Foreseeable situations include blizzards, ice storms, disease, and floods, “but it’s also as simple as — what if one day, all telecommunications go down at the city, for example?” he said, bearing in mind City Hall is the designated site of Iqaluit’s emergency operations centre.

The telecom company Northwestel has its own emergency plan, “but what does the city do at the onset of this to help support Northwestel and help coordinate things at the city level?” the fire chief said.

“That’s what’s missing in our plan.”

The territorial government’s Emergency Measures Act calls for municipalities to draft their own emergency measures plans.

The City of Iqaluit submitted its freshly revised plan to the government in 2010.

“We can’t write the perfect plan for the next 10 years, it’s impossible,” which is why regular, yearly updates are so important, Grandmaison said.

“Our community is dynamic, our population is always changing. There’s a lot of factors to consider when you’re drafting a contingency plan for a specific situation.”

Iqaluit City Hall, backed by the city’s emergency and protective services department, serves as the Nunavut capital’s emergency operations centre. (PHOTO BY PETER VARGA)