by Jeff Burgar

We’re told climate change will bring with it more extremes in weather. Worse blizzards with more snow, huge downpours causing massive floods, droughts ruining crops, bringing hordes of insects, and creating perfect conditions for immense forest fires. There will be ice storms downing power lines, knocking out services for weeks at a time.

Today freaky, tomorrow perhaps normal.

The first inclination of thinking people is look for a cause. Then, if it is humanly possible, try to address the cause. In turn, this will hopefully mitigate or lessen all the bad effects. That is our nature. Don’t hope for the best and plan for the worst. Stop the bad from happening in the first place.

It’s delusional to think this is preparation for disaster. Climate change is bringing freak storms? Well heck, let’s cut back on carbon emissions and things will work themselves out.

Really? As floods show us every year, whether in High River or Texas, or Manitoba or Bangladesh, we do a poor job managing bad things. Fort McMurray and Slave Lake? One was a warning. Two might be a lesson. And the end result of that schooling?

Well, as in the Slave Lake fire five years ago, there are hints the McMurray evacuation should have been ordered earlier. Hindsight is the perfect quarterback of what the call should have been.

The simple fact is, with so many resources available, those involved in disaster management seem as ill prepared today as others were 10, 20 and 50 years ago.

Why?

Is training that bad? Elected officials often don’t attend emergency prep courses, or send just a few. When it comes to an event, many often ignore what they learned, or can’t agree among themselves.

In year’s past, one High Prairie mayor said, in what was an obvious situation calling for action, “I don’t want anybody to panic.” The same hallmarks of thinking no doubt happened in High River, as water quickly rose. And in Slave Lake, before everybody in town was ordered to assemble in the Wal-Mart parking lot, where they learned every exit out of town was now blocked by fire. And likely in Fort McMurray.

One does not lightly order 1,000, 5,000, or 80,000 people to get out of Dodge. In fact, fire and flood are scenarios where one can do that.

It’s usually too late to tell people to get away from a tornado. It would also be nice if everybody could head south when the ice storm is coming, or a plaque of locusts is heading our way. Not likely.

The whole point here is not to spread doom and gloom or raise shrill alarms. The point is, there should be more training tools for officials of all kinds. In a perfect world, such training would spill over, often deliberately encouraged by those same officials, to the general population.

First responders [usually] have it drilled into them over and over, train, train and train some more. Decision makers should have similar policies. It’s always better to have reflex and training kick in, instead of making decisions based on “I know best because I’m old,” or “I’m a big shot.”