May 5-11 is Emergency Preparedness Week
Morden-Winkler-Stanley’s emergency coordinator encourages you to take a moment and consider the risks in our area during this year’s Emergency Preparedness Week.
Darin Driedger stresses that pre-planning is one of the most effective ways of ensuring you and your loved ones are safe during a natural disaster or other emergency.
“This week is a good chance to discuss with your family, especially, but also at your workplace—talk about emergency management and emergency preparedness,” he says.
That starts with being aware of the disasters that are most likely to occur in our area.
“Some of the common ones obviously for summer is severe weather, tornados, that kind of thing,” Driedger says. “And then in winter we talk about things like winter storms, power outages.”
And while we may have made it through this spring without much flooding, the events in the region last year—in which both Morden and Stanley grappled with serious overland flooding while Winkler’s dike was nearly breached—clearly demonstrate flooding as a potential risk residents need to be ready for.
“And there’s other things too,” Driedger notes. “A hazardous materials incident, for example, like a large fire.”
Whatever disaster may strike, Driedger urges you to consider how you would react.
“The key is to think about emergency preparedness wherever you are. So it could be at home. It could be at work.”
You want to have a plan to either evacuate, if necessary, or, more likely, shelter in place.
“Essentially, you want to get indoors,” Driedger says, adding it’s important to do so as quickly as possible in a severe weather event—don’t push your luck and try to make it across town to get home if a closer alternative is nearby. “So many of the fatalities or serious injuries occur from people in parking lots trying to get to their car and a big tree or branch hits them. Flying debris is a huge, huge risk for summer storms, and many of the injuries and fatalities in Canada seem to happen from that.”
Once you find safe haven, hunker down somewhere deep inside the building.
“A quick rule of thumb is to put as many walls as you can between you and the outside, especially for things like severe storms, tornadoes,” Driedger says. “So obviously a basement if you can, but it can also be under a stairwell in a bathroom or any kind of interior room in a building. Odds are that’s your best chance to stay safe … you are way safer there than you are if you’re caught outside.”
It’s a very human instinct to want to go see what’s going on—even if it’s just from your front window—but it can be an incredible risk to do so.
“There’s lots of online videos from Canada and the U.S. of people getting hit literally by tornadoes and they’re trying to record from their windows or something like that, which is obviously a dangerous thing to do … it only takes a few moments for some of these things to happen.”
Driedger also reminds parents that the local schools all have emergency plans that will be activated to keep the kids safe.
“So if there is an emergency, we don’t want people rushing to the school to pick up their children,” he stresses, emphasizing the danger that could cause if severe weather is making it unsafe to be out on the roads. “They have a plan there, they’re safe where they are.”
Talking with your family and co-workers about what to do in an emergency situation can take some of the panic out of it when it actually happens.
Where will everyone be? Where will you regroup or how will you get in touch with each other once the disaster is over? And do you have an emergency kit ready to go with food, water, and vital medications?
“If you think about it beforehand, it’ll be easier for you to react,” Driedger says. “So have those discussions.”
It’s also important that you sign up for your community’s emergency notification system—Alert Ready in Winkler and Stanley and CodeRed in Morden—to ensure you’ll get a heads-up when something’s happening. In a disaster, you’ll want to tune into local radio and check out the social media feeds of your municipality to stay on top of things.
For more tips on emergency planning, head to getprepared.gc.ca.
