Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Feb 20/02) - The scenario is grim. A plane has crashed into the Inuvik tank farm. The resulting fireball is spreading across the city, and flames are consuming the downtown.

Crisis snowballs into bigger crisis, and soon Inuvik's mayor is addressing the media, telling the world that the town's reserve funds are depleted. There is no more money to manage the crash scene.

In Yellowknife, senior officials from the territorial and federal government work with representatives from the power company, amateur radio association and RCMP to coordinate emergency efforts. They sit around tables on the sixth floor of the NorthwesTel tower.

Except this isn't real. It's a simulation, and the 16 people contemplating whether or not to declare a state of emergency are practising in case the real thing happens some day.

They are being led through four days of exercises by NWT Emergency Measures Organization coordinator Bernie Van Tighem and Carol Namur, a professor who has been flown in from the Canadian Emergency Preparedness College in Arnprior, Ont.

They are the Territorial Emergency Response Committee (TERC), a number of leaders specially picked and trained to do arms-length, big-picture coordination work in the event of an emergency that involves multiple governments or municipalities.

Some form of response team has existed for decades, but the present form of TERC was initially formed in case of a Y2K disaster, but can now be activated -- in whole or in part -- by any large emergency.

Eric Bussey, who chairs TERC, says the committee's job in case of emergency is to "monitor the community's response, provide assistance, and when requested assume control" of the situation. The committee takes a hands-off approach to the actual crisis, leaving tasks like firefighting to those on the ground.

TERC's main focus is on issues that concern greater numbers of people, such as public information, technical assistance and securing water or electricity supplies.

Comparisons with New York City are inevitable. TERC members wouldn't work out of a bunker like the one built by former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, but they would serve a similar function.

"Managing that kind of a situation is extremely complex," said Namur. "Before different agencies manage an emergency, it requires people to be trained so they can use some processes that allow them to analyze that information."

TERC members use an all-hazards plan, which assigns roles and gives general guidelines that can be used for any situation. The idea is to give decision-makers the latitude to apply their knowledge to any particular emergency, rather than having contingency plans that dictate step-by-step procedures.

"It allows us to work with consequences rather than incidents," said Van Tighem. "If we have an asteroid that hits town, that means a collapsed building and a number of fires."

For Joe Auge, this was the first time he had any inter-departmental training in this area.

The director of asset management for the GNWT department of public works and services said, "it was good to get together and see the views of the RCMP and Department of National Defence. ... I have a better understanding of how the various organizations would work."

"I'm pretty confident that when we'll be in a real situation everything will run very smoothly," said Daniel Auger, North Slave regional superintendent with the Department of Transportation.

But, said Auge, despite the sensitivity about preparedness following last September, "the odds of something happening catastrophically, like they did in New York, are quite remote up here. ... The one good thing is we're not a big target."