The Cariboo Regional District is planning to host a series of community consultation meetings to gain public feedback about the emergency response during the summer’s wildfires.
“Hopefully we’ll have representatives from the RCMP, Canadian Red Cross, Emergency Social Services and the Forest Service there to hear from people about what they saw, what they perceive, what went well and what went badly,” CRD Chair Al Richmond told the Tribune Tuesday.
After every major fire and after the Mount Polley Mine disaster the CRD held consultation meetings, he added.
“The difference this time is that there are so many to do and trying to get them all in is the challenge. We basically had our last order removed in the middle of September.”
The meetings will get underway next week, with an independent party co-ordinating.
“We had a poor experience with the ones we did after Mount Polley within the consultant we used so we wanted to make sure we got somebody different and we did manage to find someone,” Richmond said.
Ideally the CRD hopes to have the meetings completed before the winter sets in.
“Our challenge is going to be meeting everyone’s expectations about where we should be at. We may have to do some less formal ones later to get out and talk to people, but we have a limited time frame to get this done.”
Staff and CRD directors have been strategizing to identify where to host the meetings because there are more communities than time.
“We have to come up with a plan to get out and speak with as many people as possible.”
After the meetings are completed, the information will be compiled in a report to help the CRD do things better in the future and help everyone that was involved to see how things can be improved.
“For some people things went really well, and we were very fortunate and did not have loss of life, but there is always room to do better,” Richmond said. “We have had positive feedback and criticism already.”
One of the biggest problems continues to be that some people have not received their evacuation money from Red Cross, Richmond said.
“We have been working with Red Cross to try and solve it,” he said. “We have people who live in areas that were evacuated longer than two weeks, but they pick up their mail in town and Red Cross focuses on a postal code, rather than a physical address.”
Richmond said the CRD has hired a recovery co-ordinator who will “hopefully” be on board this week.
“We have hired someone local, which is nice,” Richmond said. “I am looking forward to starting the next process of figuring out how do we fix and how do we recover from it? We all know we’ve lost forest and fibre, but what do we do with the tourism industry? Many of our tourism operators lost the whole season.”
In addition to community consultation meetings, a survey, school visits, Facebook live and other methods will be used to connect and gain feedback from residents throughout October and November.
Further information will be available on the CRD Facebook page facebook.com/CRDEmergencyOperations or cariboord.ca.
