It was interesting to listen to a presentation Monday at the regular meeting of Yorkton Council regarding is Emergency Preparedness Week in Canada May 5-11.
Living in a small Canadian city in the middle of Saskatchewan the idea of dealing with disasters is not generally at the forefront of our thinking,
But, Yorkton residents should be prepared to deal with emergencies if they arise, as was pointed out by Lisa Washington Community Development Manager, with the City as she made a presentation to the Council meeting Monday.
Washington said there is help for people wanting to be better prepared.
“Public Safety Canada has published a guide for Canadians to educate themselves on how they and their families can be prepared, for a minimum of three days, in the event of an emergency. Their publication, “Your Emergency Preparedness Guide” is also available for download at www.getprepared.gc.ca.”
There are a wide variety of resources to help citizens make a plan and get a kit together. These can be found online at www.getprepared.gc.ca and also, on our website under the ‘Living Here’ tab and clicking on ‘Emergency Preparedness’, added Washington.
Taking the time to learn more is something we should all do, because in recent memory events have occurred locally which were bad enough at the time, but could have been to the point of the local impact being much more severe.
We need only think back to the flood in our city Canada Day 2010, leaving many in the community with water damaged homes, sending several families to temporary housing pending dealing with their water-damaged homes.
The same situation struck a few years later with extensive flooding in the city. This time flooding was a regional issue, with the patients at the Melville hospital moved because of the threat of flooding.
More recently, a number of residents in Yorkton were evacuated from their homes when a warehouse facility in the city caught fire in 2017, which sent clouds of potentially toxic smoke into the air.
And while it was not a local issue, this spring a prairie wildfire in the Biggar area threatened that community. It could happen here.
And that is why we should all be prepared.
We may not think we have to work about disaster striking, but whether it is a spill of a dangerous substance, fire, flooding, a severe winter storm, or a tornado, it can happen here.
Emergency Preparedness Week helps us think about the danger, and encourages us to be ready.
