Slave Lake fire evacuees question province’s emergency warning system

As residents of Slave Lake struggle to come to grips with the scale of the disaster that has struck their community, concerns are being raised about how – and how quickly – public warnings were issued.

"They should have called it the day before," says lifelong Slave Lake resident Peter Prosser. "They knew the winds were going to come … they know how hard that winds going to blow."

In fact, the province’s Emergency Public Warning System was never activated.

"The public warning system is designed to give people, where there is a fair amount of lead time, information that will tell them about the hazard and the actions that they can take," said Colin Lloyd with the Alberta Emergency Management Agency. "This was not the case with this particular fire."

Provincial officials say fire conditions changed so quickly that there was simply no time to activate the system.

"Once the winds started picking up those embers from the fire and pushing them out ahead of the fire … the time from that happening to the time of the fire moving across the highway, we’re talking less than about an hour," said Rob Harris with Sustainable Resource Development.

Officials also point out that by the time an evacuation order was issued the radio station based in Slave Lake had lost its signal.

"It’s used over the radio and therefore it would not have been any use in the community," Lloyd said.

But the system is designed to issue warnings in wildfire situations. One year ago, on May 16, the system was activated following a wildfire in the Opal area. However, AEMA officials maintain the system could not have been used in this case.

"It’s only ever used ahead of time," Lloyd said. "The thing i want to emphasize is this – there was an extremely efficient and orderly evacuation that occurred."

"I’m not going to second guess what happened on Sunday," Premier Ed Stelmach said Tuesday afternoon. "I’m very grateful that every resident was evacuated safely. We’ll have to to review who said what and when. The most important thing is that lives were saved."

With files from Vinesh Pratap