Communities

General

This section presents guidance and ideas for those who face the challenge of helping their local, smaller coastal communities deal with climate change and severe weather. Larger communities (generally) possess Emergency Management Organizations (EMO). Smaller communities, however, may have limited capacity due the need for resources or specially trained personnel. This section is not intended for major cities, but for those smaller communities.

As an initial starting point, consider the references included on the Resources page. One of these is an ANSI standard (ANSI EMAP EMS 5-2022) and another is the FEMA 2011 Whole Community Approach. The ECCC page to the climate adaptation portal has a number of resources, including the Talking it Through: Guide for Local Government Staff of Climate Adaptation.

While these resources are useful, many Coastal Communities simply don’t have the resources to take on this completely. This is where they can be used as a guide so you can cover off the important things first, and then build out. It may take a few years, but it’s often the situation we find ourselves in.

Your Community’s Importance – Three Viewpoints

Consider wider, local, and inhabitant viewpoints when looking at your community’s importance.

Wider viewpoints result from the presence of unique economic or transportation-related activities. For example, a ferry terminal or regional airport meets this criteria. Similarly, an LNG terminal or something similar may not exist elsewhere. Identify these kinds of activities and be ready to get higher levels of government involved in supporting them.

Do people living in your region need to come to your community for certain services, such as food, medicine, or other services? If so, then consider your community in terms of the support it provides to the locality.

Finally, consider how your community provides services to its residents. In this context, the question of how to protect key infrastructure points becomes important. So does being able to coordinate activities within the community.

Refer to the list here for further guidance (coming soon).

Identifying Risks

Smaller community leaders face challenges at this point. Often trained, experienced, and (often) expensive experts conduct risk assessments. Smaller communities may not have the resources to hire these professionals or practitioners. So where to start.

First, ask yourself the following three questions:

  • What has damaged infrastructure in my community in the past (storm surge, severe winds, storms, snowfalls, etc.)?
  • What has caused my community to fragment so that it’s “everyone for themselves?”
  • What longer-term acts or conditions (such as sea-level rise) may gradually affect our community?

The “Resources” page on this site presents some sources of information. Don’t forget to look within your own community and its history for events that caused disruption, hardship, or stress. Similarly, you can refer to the “Step 1 – Be Aware” page for additional information but remember you’re focusing on a community, not an address,

The ECCC Canadian Center for Climate Change (see the Resources page under Specialized Official Sources) has a number of methodologies and approaches that may be useful.

Mitigation

Mitigation involves taking those longer-term steps that help you avoid issues or that reduce the impact of certain issues. Consider sea-levels rising. What can be done to limit the impacts of this challenge?

The “Step 2 Mitigation” page may be useful from an infrastructure perspective, but the community’s needs go beyond this. As you examine specific infrastructure points (like a building, sports complex, etc.), its principles become more useful. At a community level, mitigation falls into two main categories:

  • Governance or rules that prevent situations from arising in the future. Correcting all issues may not be possible. Relocating businesses and homes from impacts areas poses challenges not easily overcome. Rules like no new development on flood plains (or too close to areas affected by coastal erosion) come into play here.
  • Building resilient infrastructure falls into this category. Look for what are called “single points of failure (such as a single road in or out). If protecting these against events is too costly, then look at building alternatives (like a second road) or putting in place measures that will help organizations response faster.

Mitigation measures often require permits (federal or provincial) and the services of specially trained or even licensed persons.

As a note, mitigation measures are generally longer term. This means that you should consider how the impact is changing over time. For example, if you are looking at creating a seawall that is intended to last for 25 years, you could use historical data up to today, but this would likely become increasingly inadequate over time if conditions worsen. Projecting out a combination of sea level rise and what increased storm surge/storm conditions would likely look like in 25 years is less certain but may offer greater assurances that it will be enough when it’s needed.

Preparation

The “Step 3 Prepare” provides guidance that is more useful to homeowners but that may serve as something that can help people be more ready for certain events (resulting in a lower impact).

Communities can prepare by taking on three things:

  • First, identify an individual and get them trained in basic Emergency Management or at least the Incident Command System. Refer to the “Resources” page for a starting point, particularly the section “Sources of Online Training.”
  • Second, establish a community focal point to act as both a “safe point” but also a coordination point for responders. Having a point like this reduces the time needed to help coordinate efforts to get things back up and running.
  • Third, establish a cache of resources and services that may help responding to and recovering from an event. A checklist of some of these can be found here (coming soon).

Prepare – Build the Community and People

Communities respond better to these situations than people. Leverage the community’s inherent desire to help each other out or foster this. Similarly, leadership cannot be allowed to operate in isolation. Build bridges to higher levels of government (regional municipalities, provinces, federal) and neighbouring groups.

Reach out to the different Emergency Management groups. Beyond government, look to something called the Humanitarian Work Force in Canada. These groups have a history of being able to help and often assist communities in mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery operations.

What incentives do people have to help? Consider alternatives like offering breaks on property taxes or credits where people or organizations volunteer resources or services in times of need. Consider drone operations. A hobby photographer with a small drone (249g or less due to licensing) may be very useful in terms of helping survey certain areas after an event (noting that drone operations need to be coordinated not to interfere with other air operations like fire fighting).

A guide is in production and will appear here shortly.

Community Space

The community space serves three purposes.

  • First, as a focal point for the emergency management function, it gives people and organizations a place to coordinate activities from. Think of this like a command post where planning, operations, logistics, and administration occurs.
  • Second, local residents know where to register and seek assistance before, during, and after an event.
  • Finally, the spaces holds key resources that the community may need during the event and recovering from the event.

Each of these plays a critical role. The focal point helps avoid confusion and allow the community to organize its response so that no one is left behind. The storage point allow for a community to hold critical equipment (like generators), stores (tools), and supplies (fuel, lubricants) so recovery efforts can begin, even if its cut off. Having this available and centralizing services allows for a community to know where to go and, in the case where certain people cannot get there themselves, a way to organize transportation.

Space Considerations

Should the community need support, the first challenge involves organizing the combination of planned services and spontaneous volunteers (people who show up wanting to help). The second challenge involves how to deal with the people that need assistance and come looking for it. Keep these separate from each other.

Looking after people lies at the core of smaller coastal communities. Everyone knows each other and relies on each other to some extent. For the space, have a location with parking and seating where people arrive, register, can have services assigned, can pick up basic relief supplies, and can depart (preferably by a second route to limit traffic issues). This takes space for registration, storage of things given out, and movement. It may also need a space off to the side where those that are particularly stressed or need special assistance can be helped out of the public eye.

Response and recovery efforts focus their efforts along something called the “Incident Command System” The EMI course catalogue on the “Resources” page can point you towards ICS 100 and ICS 200 that introduce this in significant detail. To meet the needs of this structure (which involves leadership, planning, operations, logistics, and administration / finance), the community space should be divisible into the following main areas:

  • A larger space for operations including planning, operations, coordination, etc. Only those involved in this should be allowed into this space.
  • A space for briefings or announcements separate from the operations space.
  • A space for storage of equipment, stores, and supplies.

Space for Displaced

Coastal communities may face situations where persons lose their homes. Finding places for those responding to the events and those displaced can pose challenges. If people leave the area. ensure that they register with contact information so they are not forgotten. If people have nowhere to go, then where to turn?

The United Nations Refugee Agency provides guidance for those who support refugees, a not incomparable challenge. Their standards for shelters and the like provide some guidance to the organizers of similar camps. The USA Department of Housing publishes design details for accessible disaster relief housing. The Province of British Columbia publishes a Framework for Emergency Shelter Programs that may provide some information on how to approach the issue in your community. Again, these provide information that you may consider and should tailor to your specific community needs as some fo the guidance is tailored more to their specific operations.

Information

Disasters and similar emergencies result in confusion. Good information management practices seem less sexy than running outdoors to open roads with a chainsaw, but are just as critical to getting a community back on its feet. When organizing the small communities information holdings, consider the following:

  • Good maps: 1:25000 or 1:50000 topographical maps and maps with address information (hard copy or electronic).
  • Registers of inhabitants, those that have property in the area or those that rent (and their property owners).
  • Vulnerable persons in terms of medical needs, transportation restrictions, or diminished capacity to manage these kinds of situations.
  • Business registers.
  • Lists of equipment (generators, earth movers, etc.), stores (tools, shovels, etc.) and supplies (lumber, tarps, fuel, etc.).
  • Lists of businesses with whom the community has supply arrangements that may be useful (opening roads, moving debris, etc.)

Communities often hold vital records. Ensuring that the community’s town hall (or equivalent), churches, and similar services are keeping off-line backups of vital records can go a long way. Consider also ensuring that people maintain their own vital records (deeds, insurance, birth certificates, medications, passports, tax records (income tax) other identity documents, banking, etc.) can help out.

Programs that have property owners taking pictures of their property (all the way around and roof) before events can assist in efforts in determining insurance or other forms of relief.

Building the Routine

The saying of “fail to plan, plan to fail” rings truer and truer in this context. Similarly, cutting corners during exercises offers a way to introduce bad habits that will likely cost you later.

The first key is to develop a realistic and workable plan. This involves asking some hard questions. Don’t build the perfect plan. Build the plan that you can use and then work on gradually improving it.

The second key involves building the community. This involves a “360 degree approach.” Build upwards into the levels of government higher than the community (regional municipalities, provinces, federal) and get to know those points of contact and their alternates. Get involved at those levels to build an understanding of what’s available and how to access it. Then build out laterally. This involves reaching out to neighbouring groups to figure out what resources can be shared and how to support each other (look up the term mutual aid agreements). The Province of Saskatchewan posted what a Mutual Aid Agreement looks like but understand that these can be tailored (and should be) to fit your needs..

Finally, build out your awareness based on spans of control. At the core is understanding what you have and control. These can be used as needed and at your discretion. Then comes the span of influence or those things that you can guide towards helping the community but not necessarily control. Finally, there are those things that you can only be aware of but cannot control or really influence.

Response

As a smaller community, you aren’t likely to have all the resources you need to respond to yourself. You can hope you have most of them, but hope isn’t really the best planning tool. This is where collaborating with neighbouring communities, regional levels of government, or even reaching out to the various volunteer organizations may prove useful.

First, you need to understand the challenge you’re facing. This means getting an understanding of your situation, your resources, and having an idea of what you need to start with (the importance of a good plan comes in play here). Are you dealing with floods, power outages, dangerous temperatures, or some combination of these and more? You may have already activated your “Emergency Management Plan” at a general level and opened up your centre, but now you’re getting down to the more detailed plans.

Second, you need to work down the priorities. If you have set up your plan based on an assessment of risk in the mitigation and prepare phases, then this is pretty straight forward. There are really three things to focus on: (1) preservation of life, (2) protecting your critical infrastructure, and (3) getting conditions in place so you can receive help from outside if its needed.

If you need to focus, consider the big three: energy, transportation, and telecommunications

Some people balk a little because we haven’t talked about preserving property yet. That comes shortly. These measures come first because you are talking about making sure that people and the community are out of immediate danger.

.Third, once your big three are manageable (they won’t be perfect), you will want to facilitate the arrival of any additional supporting resources (federal, provincial, industry, or volunteer) to start building capacity. You may already have representatives (or at least communications) with these people from the “Step 2 – Prepare” phase but this is where you are beginning to use your resources and bring in those additional resources.

Think of this like clearing roads. First, you need to have that centre open so you can coordinate activities. That centre needs power and some form of communications, as does the community. Then you can focus on opening up main routes from the outside into the community. Once those are manageable, you can begin to open up the major side streets and so on.

In taking this approach, those on the less serviced and more remote locations are likely to be responded to later in the response. Taking care of those people often becomes a matter of activities to determine if there are life-safety issues and taking steps to make sure they can last until the response gets to them.

The Importance of Training, Drills, and Exercises

This cannot be overstated. If you fail to train, drill, and exercise, your chances of responding effectively, frankly, have the glide ratio of a large rock.

Training begins with two parts. The first part is knowing what to do. That’s covered in plans and the like. Get people used to their roles to the point where they can do them when they are stressed and tired. Why? Because those are the conditions they will be working in.

Second, there’s doing those things safely (for themselves and those around them). This training is more task based. This involves finding good trainers (talk to the SAR people, Team Rubicon Canada, and so on) who can provide good training so that the job not only gets done, but gets done without people getting hurt.

Drills involve testing a small part of the plan. This is where you need to have some discipline. Write a good plan then practice it so its perfect. Then build on it. It will take time and effort, but it will get there eventually. The big challenge will be when trained people decide its time to go somewhere else, so consider training a couple of people for key jobs so that you can at least have one show up.

Drills and exercises are progressive. You will hear terms like”table top”, “walk through”, and so on. This is just starting simply and then getting progressively more realistic. That realism will take two forms: how much of the plan the drill or exercise covers and the conditions under which it happens.

Another note, if you cut corners or cheat on your drills and exercises, you will miss things. Remember that people will tend to respond the way that they were trained. So cutting corners may look like a good idea, but remember the saying “we are chasing perfection and while we may not get it, we will achieve excellence.” Good solid training and exercising should make responding to events seem easy.

Finally, get involved in the communities around you. Reach out to larger municipalities or the province to participate in their exercises. Reach out to the various volunteer groups and see if they can help out with things.

Recovery

This part will be hard. It will be physically demanding, it will be tedious. It will be detail oriented and it will be laced with emotional and psychological challenges as people come out of “survival mode” and begin to process what just happened. Don’t discount these kinds of impacts and make sure that if you are bringing in experts, they bring a capacity or contacts that can help with things like disaster shock. There are some links on the resources page that provide some initial guidance but get the professionals involved.

Certain organizations tend to focus on exact replacement. That may work for a property owner replacing a stereo, but as a community you need to do better. Take the time to analyze what failed and why it failed. Again, get professionals or at least experienced people involved in that and look at how to build it back better.

It’s one thing for infrastructure to fail. That can happen. But if it’s constantly failing for the same reason over and over again, you need to start questioning if things are headed in the right direction. Builds back so that the problem you faced isn’t going to become the next challenge as well.

If you need to prioritize the “build back better activities”, it may be prudent to look at two criteria. The first would be the criticality of the infrastructure. For example, if you can only treat 10km of road this way, it may be prudent to make sure your main roads are taken care of so that they are less susceptible to disruptions. The second involves impacts. While many organizations look at this in terms of financial thresholds, you may want to consider the impacts in terms of vulnerable populations and impacts. While you can look at this in terms of reducing impacts in terms of cost, you may also want to look at this in terms of safety improvements for your responders the next time there is an event.

Wrap Up

Work is progressing on various forms of guidance that may be useful. This page presents a starting point for communities to help set up for these challenges. The key takeaway—you’re not in this alone and you should become part of the community of organizations working this challenge. Leverage that community’s experience and understanding of events but tailor it to your own needs and circumstances.

There is a lot of ground covered here and it’s not complete. On the resources page, you’ll see some standards and guidance (like the ANSI EMAP 5-2022). Look at the topics covered by those (at the least) so that you’ve got a better view of what a comprehensive emergency management plan looks like.