Jennifer Geens
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sep 23/05) - The man in charge of Yellowknife's emergency planning says communication is good between emergency response organizations.

"It's a very big teamwork approach," said Dennis Marchiori, director of Public Safety for the City of Yellowknife.

In the U.S., a lack of communication between government response organizations may have been part of the problem in getting help to survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

As part of his training, the City is sending Marchiori to the Canadian Emergency Preparedness College in Ottawa for a week-long course on how to run an emergency operations centre, which will include training on coordinating the responses of different agencies.

Kevin Rowe, NWT's community emergency management coordinator said the Territorial Emergency Response committee meets at least once a year.

The committee includes all government departments that have an emergency response capability, as well as the NWT Power Corp., Northland Utilities and NorthwesTel.

"Knowing who you can turn to for support is just as important as knowing what your role is," he said.

Using the 2003 Norman Wells evacuation as an example, Rowe said communities can rely on the territorial government to help with supplies and logistics.

"We don't expect them to figure out 'Who should I phone for planes and how many do I need,'" said Rowe.

But the government doesn't take over management of the situation.

"We'll provide the means," said Rowe. "We'll get the planes or the boats or the sandbags or 4,000 shots of penicillin but we're not going to step in and take over."

Only in a catastrophic situation where the local infrastructure was wiped out, would the GNWT take command, said Rowe.

Under the Civil Emergency Management Act, all communities in the NWT must have an emergency plan. Rowe said about a third of communities have out of date plans, and another third may have no official plan.

The City of Yellowknife's emergency plan was last revised in March 2005. It covers scenarios such as a forest fire, or a winter power outage.

The last time the city invoked emergency measures was on Sept. 11, 2001, when a United Airlines 777 bound for Seattle was diverted to our airport.

The 144 passengers and 16 crew were housed in the Armed Forces Forward Operations Centre for three days until North American airspace reopened.