Quesnel City Council unanimously approved a Heat Alert Response Plan at Tuesday night’s meeting, despite the fact that they haven’t seen exactly what’s in it..
They are working with Williams Lake and 100 Mile House and 100 percent of the costs are being covered.
City Manager Byron Johnson says it has thrown the timing off a bit.
“We had hoped to have that plan fully presented out to Council in advance of this, a formal presentation of it, but the consultant, in order to meeting the timing for the grants, needs to get approval from Council on the plan. So what’s being suggested is that Council approves the plan tonight, and staff has worked on that plan and it’s been well reviewed by staff.”
Johnson also suggested that the plan go to a couple of committees before coming back to the full Council.
“We’re recommending that the plan we forwarded to the Emergency Management Committee and Public Safety and Policing Committee for a final review and then bring it back to Council for an actual full presentation of that plan.”
He said that things could still be changed after that.
“When you think about it, that type of response plan would be very similar to other emergency plans which are always live documents anyways. Emergency Response Plans change as there are changes in the community, so it’s not that unrealistic that we could accept it, it’s a good solid document, and then if there was something significant where Council thought we should tweak that, we could still do some tweaks to it.”
Councillor Martin Runge was the only one to comment.
“For me I love that it’s 100 percent funded. The question always is financial implications going forward, and as long as we have a chance to discuss all those things in detail later, I am absolutely 100 percent in favour of this.”
The province asked local governments to come up with extreme heat plans in light of the heat dome back in 2021 that saw 740 deaths in BC, which was a mortality rate that was three times greater than average.
