Shannon Alfred Cormorant Island Emergency Preparedness

November 25th, 2020

Hello Cormorant Island Residents

Last week was quite something, I had never witnessed a windstorm that strong before in all my life of windstorms. Winds gusting to what I feel were at 115 if not more.

In a small community we do our best to provide information to community members to be prepared at home for a number of emergency events that could impact our community.

Every winter our community experiences severe wind storms and a number of power outages. Such as the 1996 mini blizzard when our community was with out power for 4 days and people were going over to Port McNeill. I at the time was living on social assistance and could not do that and my household survived pretty much on cereal for the 4 days, and under bundles of blankets.

Another winter storm occurred a year or two later, left us without power for 3 days. This time I went over to Port McNeill and they were without power as well so it was back home to my cold dark place and living on cereal again.

10 years later, as the Emergency Program Coordinator since 2005 is working and providing information to all community members to be prepared as much as possible at home for at least 72 hours.

The emergency management program does it best to prepare, and will respond once it is confirmed from BC Hydro that our community will be without power for more than 2 days. There will be a debriefing meeting next week with the Emergency Management Committee to discuss;

What worked

2. What were some the challenges to respond

3. What are recommendation moving forward to be better prepared

Please feel free to email me at Shannon.Alfred@namgis.bc.ca if you would like to comment or provide your experience of the Wind Storm / Power Outage. Your input would greatly be appreciated, you input will provide the Emergency Program with information we may not have been aware of or have knowledge of before.

I have also, enclosed a link to BC Hydro's webpage for you of things that can be done to prepare your home for an outage. Let's hope and pray our community doesn't get hit hard like that again, but if it does lets work together to be better prepared in our home and for our community.

https://www.bchydro.com/.../prepar.../prepare-your-home.html