Editor:
In response to Gord Irwin’s letter “public safety is always part of the equation” in the Jan. 25 Outlook and to clarify a few points from my letter on January 18.
My letter was intended to address a specific concern of evacuating the south side of the bridge with the pedestrian zone in place. For the last 18 years, I was responsible for emergency management of this community and put a considerable amount of time and effort to that end, including contemplating multiple types of emergencies and evacuation scenarios, developing, improving, and continually exercising our emergency plans and building capacity and collaboration by developing a regional emergency management plan with the Town of Canmore.
The 2019 functional exercise that involved hundreds of people with boots on the ground is just one example. The traffic data that I used was gathered from actual vehicle movement data from busy summer traffic counts with only a handful of “green overrides”.
Getting back to my Jan. 18 letter, only two viable lanes are available on the Bow River Bridge for northbound evacuation with three lanes available at Buffalo Street. One down Banff Avenue pedestrian zone, one up and over Otter Street, and one down Lynx Street and, therefore, I did not see any significant issues.
What I left out was the fact that I was using the bigger picture of the “worst case scenario” of evacuating the entire community at the same time.
Using every exit and every strategy and tactic available would always be contemplated based on all the variables of the emergency faced and if we look at that specific scenario of total evacuation of the town, moving the south side as I explained earlier would allow the north side residents to utilize Banff Avenue to evacuate minimizing congestion and allowing for all viable routes to be used out of town with the goal of getting people out of harm’s way as quickly and safely as possible.
We also need to be realistic on how large a fire will get if it starts that close to town giving us only one to two hours to impingement. Compound Meadows can also be used as an example of how quickly a fire can be put under control with a few helicopters and two fire trucks.
The current fire chief and the new director of protective and emergency services are exceptional, and they will continue to evolve and improve not only our wildfire preparedness, mitigation, and response, but also our entire emergency management program.
Gord, I hope this better explains the motivation for my comments. I believe we are on the same page when it comes to emergency management and do not disagree that we always need to be prepared with multiple strategies and tactics to deal with major emergencies.
Silvio Adamo,
Banff
