City council at Monday's meeting. (Angela Brown/battlefordsNOW Staff)

By Angela Brown

Multi-year process

City reviews new regional emergency management plan

Jan 24, 2023 | 6:30 AM

The City of North Battleford council approved the new regional emergency management plan presented at Monday’s council meeting.

Fire chief and director of protective services Lindsay Holm said the Battlefords Regional Emergency Management Group Plan (BREMG) 2023-2024, took a couple of years to complete, and includes the City of North Battleford, the Town of Battleford, the RM of North Battleford, and five area First Nations – Little Pine, Lucky Man, Moosomin, Saulteaux, and Sweetgrass – in the Battlefords Regional Community Coalition (BRCC).

“It’s something that I’m quite proud of. It really shows what we can do as a group and a region when we put our minds together,” Holm said. “[It’s] a rather large plan,… but it is a very comprehensive plan.”

Holm noted while city council may approve it now, the document will remain “fluid,” for consistent updating as required.

The other various partners will also need to approve the plan as well.

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The plan contains two parts, and indicates that the precise response to an emergency will depend on the type of the incident in question.

“Due to the nature of disasters and the inability to accurately predict all of the variables of future disasters in the region, it is understood that this plan is intended as a guide, and that the subsequent organizational response to future disasters will be incident dependent, to deal with the incident in the most effective manner possible,” the report said.

Mayor David Gillan commended Holm and all those involved for their work in preparing the plan.

“It’s very good that we finally got that plan done,” he said. “It was a collaboration with the Battlefords Regional Community Coalition, and our largest neighbours – the Town of Battleford, [and] the RM of North Battleford … We all work together.”

Gillan said council is pleased to see the project now completed.

He noted the province put in the majority of the funding for the initiative through a grant, and the region is coming together to fund the balance.

“The good news is we are working together as a region. We share and we are able to leverage that [collaboration] to [acquire] grants,” Gillan said. “Those are the benefits of working together – we all get resources we couldn’t [obtain] ourselves.”

Gillan added what matters most is not just how the report came together, but the essential value of the plan, to protect the regional community as whole.

“It’s for being prepared in a disaster,” he said. “It’s about how great it is to have emergency plans, because, as we know, people have to be protected in these [situations].”

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Angela.Brown@pattisonmedia.com

On Twitter: @battlefordsnow