UQSUQTUUQ/GJOA HAVEN - All of Nunavut's communities are working to update outdated emergency preparedness plans, according to Nunavut's director of protection services Ed Zebedee.

Nunavut's director of protection services says communities will practise their updated emergency plans once they're made. - NNSL file photo

"The old plans were very old, most of them were from the 80s," Zebedee said.

The new plans are part of a nation-wide update strategy, he said.

"There has been a national push to update emergency plans across the country," he said. "So jurisdictions are updating all across Canada."

Updating the plans involves forming a community control group in each community, members of which participate in a four-day training session. The groups consist of roughly 12 "key players" in the community, said Glen Higgins, manager of emergency preparedness for the Department of Community and Government Services.

Hamlet senior administrative officers, mayors, school principals, RCMP members, nurses, power plant operators, fire chiefs, among others, are included.

Some communities also include members of the Canadian Rangers and local housing authorities, and larger communities include airport representatives, Higgins said.

"That is the group that would be involved in emergency planning for the community and certainly they would most likely be involved in any emergency situation," Higgins said.

The groups start off by identifying possible emergency situations specific to their communities.

"One of the very first things is we do a hazard identification and risk assessment/analysis," Higgins said. "That allows the community to actually put their hazards down in a way that they can see what they are, what hazards they have to plan to mitigate against."

In Gjoa Haven, power outages over the Christmas holidays prompted the community to identify power outages as its largest risk, mayor Joanni Sallerina said.

"The most important one in our community would be a power outage," he said. "We'd like to have a plan in place so if there is a power outage in the community, any emergencies that need to be dealt with, the emergency response team would deal with that."

Zebedee said while plans are different for each community depending on size and other factors, the hazards are the same for most communities.

"It's consistent in most of the communities, power plants, airports, they're pretty well consistent in all the communities," he said. "The templates can be used for an airport hazard versus a loss of municipal services, they're not specific to an exact hazard, but we still identify all the hazards in the community."

Once plans are in place, the control groups then practice their emergency response procedures.

"We actually come up with an emergency scenario and we let these guys run with it and see how they would react with that emergency," Zebedee said.

The overall goal is to ensure communities are prepared to deal with emergencies without the immediate aid of outside help, Higgins said.

"They have the training to carry it forward," he said.

If a community experiences an emergency situation during a blizzard, the team needs to be able to respond until help can arrive.

"We want to develop their capabilities and capacities to respond to their own emergencies," he said. "They may very well be on their own and we can't ignore that."

Higgins said Nunavummiut need to recognize the possibility of emergency situations happening in the territory.

"Something will happen here, it's not a matter of 'if' it’s a matter of 'when,' so don’t overlook that things can happen," Higgins said.

Nine communities have completed the workshops, including all communities in the Kitikmeot region, Higgins said.

Approximately half of the cost of the updates are funded by the territorial government and the remaining half from Public Safety Canada's joint emergency preparedness program, Higgins said.

The updates are expected to be complete in each community by the end of the 2010/2011 fiscal year, Higgins said.