“We know that if we were recommending a large-scale evacuation from multiple communities, by and large, most people are going to be dumping onto the Highway 1 corridor,” said Katherine Severson, director of emergency management for the Town of Banff.
BANFF – Bow Valley communities are planning to undertake transportation modelling for various scenarios to prepare a regional evacuation plan to supplement municipal evacuation plans in the face of the elevated wildfire risk in recent years.
During the Bow Valley interagency wildfire committee’s public presentation in Banff on Feb. 25, fire officials announced that the Town of Canmore, which is taking the lead on the project with Banff and MD of Bighorn, was successful in getting $150,000 from the province to begin the work this spring.
“We know that if we were recommending a large-scale evacuation from multiple communities, by and large, most people are going to be dumping onto the Highway 1 corridor,” said Katherine Severson, director of emergency management for the Town of Banff.
“One of the pieces of the work that we’re excited to announce is that the towns of Banff and Canmore have received a grant to do some investigation on modelling of the impacts on the time and volume of traffic dumping onto the Highway 1 corridor.”
Banff National Park and Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay field units have also expressed interest in the modelling and planning aspects of evacuations through their areas as well.
Wildfire remains the top-rated hazard to communities in the Bow Valley stretching from Lac Des Arcs to Lake Louise, with climate change continuing to produce hotter and drier weather.
All communities have developed into the wildland-urban interface, and all are surrounded by dense forests.
Officials say it is likely that an evacuation of Canmore will be simultaneous with evacuation of parts of the MD of Bighorn, and similarly, it is highly likely that the evacuation of either Banff or Canmore/Bighorn would impact the other communities based on their proximity and the makeup of the transportation network.
They say preparing for a regional evacuation or an evacuation of one community into the other is important to increase resilience given the high wildfire risk.
“This project will really create resiliency in the Bow Valley by furthering understanding of evacuation challenges and mitigations at a regional level,” said Caitlin Miller, director of emergency management for the Town of Canmore during a March 4 council meeting.
“It will confirm assumptions regarding our evacuation plans, provide considerations to be used in evacuations and outline the roles, responsibilities and high level strategies for evacuations.”
Increased visitation to the Bow Valley has increased the number of vehicles within the region. At times, the population with visitors can more than double the actual population that resides in the Bow Valley. Banff has about 9,000 residents and Canmore has just over 17,000 people.
Ensuring that modelling includes and incorporates the visitors who are within or driving through the communities during an evacuation is a priority for this project.
In addition, there are a number of people living, working, and visiting the Bow Valley who do not use or have access to a personal vehicle.
At the forum, Severson said a common question is whether Banff’s evacuation plans take into consideration the number of visitors to the tourist town.
“It’s very likely that more visitors will need to be evacuated than residents during an evacuation and the answer is absolutely, yes, we understand that at any given time, especially during the wildfire season, we have tens of thousands of visitors in the Bow Valley that we also need to safely evacuate,” she said.
“An example of how we prepare to manage the visitor in the context of an evacuation is the relationship, the pre-planning and training we do with some of our tourism industry partners, the hospitality association to help businesses understand, but of course some of major hotels and major stakeholders in how do we prepare to get visitors out safely.”
Severson said there are several phases to evacuation, including early evacuation.
“There is a possibility, especially in a wildfire scenario, that we will have some amount of time to know that the fire will be a threat to our community and we will at some point contemplate, given our pre-established thresholds, as to when we will make the determination to request evacuation of this town,” she said.
“If we do that, what you may see is a phased evacuation, so you would see communications from officials like myself requesting certain neighbourhoods or certain parts in the town of Banff to evacuate in a controlled fashion.”
The flip side of that coin is emergency evacuation, which is more in line with what happened in Jasper last summer. The fire eventually destroyed one-third of the tourist town after all residents were safely escorted out of town to safety.
“When we have those types of situations there’s other sets of plans that we have in place to be able to communicate and request everyone inside a community to evacuate at the same time,” said Severson.
“We do consider things like multi-modal, so how many different ways can we get people to leave the town? We work really closely with our mass transportation partners to identify how we could move people from the Bow Valley that don’t have personal vehicles to evacuate in.”
Severson said one of Banff’s biggest challenges is the Bow River cutting the community in half, with only one vehicle bridge.
“That is a situation we take very seriously in our pre-planning and we look at the restrictions and time that that feature presents to us,” she said.
Parks Canada is looking at options for a temporary evacuation route out of town via Sundance and Healy Creek.
Charlie McLellan, a Parks Canada fire and vegetation specialist, said part of the planned work for logging a 350-hectare area in the Brewster/Healy Creek area west of Banff, is to put in a road in order to extract the timber.
“One part of this project is they will have to put a road in to extract the timber so they will fix that to Sundance road and they are looking at the feasibility with engineering to put a bridge over to the Sunshine road,” he said.
“That would provide for emergency if there was an evacuation to provide a different route from that side of town.”
All Bow Valley residents were urged to sign up for Voyent Alerts.
Severson said the other critical alerting system is the Alberta emergency alert system, which automatically pushes alerts on TV, radio and phones.
“That is an interrupting alert system so rest assured, even if you’re not subscribed, you’re going to get a push alert through that system,” she said.
In the event of an emergency, Severson said residents can also expect to be alerted through RCMP doing door-to-door knocking.
“Law enforcement has the functional jurisdiction to be responsible for the safe transportation for people out of this community,” she said.
“We work with the RCMP really closely on the development of our plans because as we all know best-laid plans, the evacuation isn’t necessarily going to occur on Monday at noon, it’s going to occur on a Sunday at night in the middle of the night, or on the Friday of a long weekend.”
