What would happen if a tornado tore through the centre of St. Albert, destroying homes and cutting off access to St. Albert Trail? The city hopes it never finds out — but earlier this month, it staged a full-scale emergency exercise to test its preparedness, response procedures and a new damage-assessment tool.
The scenario builds on a tabletop exercise held last year. This year, the city moved to a functional exercise, simulating what would happen on “day two” of a major tornado event. The tornado has already struck. Homes are gone. St. Albert Trail is impassable. Now what?
A total of 127 City of St. Albert staff took part, along with eight students from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), and emergency personnel from Edmonton, Parkland County and Sturgeon County.
Planning the exercise took about four months, said Mark Pickford, the city’s emergency management manager. Staff ran mock planning meetings for fictional operating periods—such as 4 p.m. to midnight—to determine what supplies would be needed and how to allocate emergency resources.
“We had to set up all the documentation, the incident action plans, the mapping,” Pickford said. “We had to generate everything as if it had all already happened so we could exist in a day-two space for the exercise.”
To add realism, communications advisor Kathy DeJong acted as Mayor Cathy Heron during a fictional press conference with NAIT journalism students.
Pickford said the city regularly runs exercises to help employees build and retain the skills they would need in a real emergency.
“These are perishable skills,” he said. “If we don’t do them enough, you kind of forget how to do it. So that’s why we always try to do these at the start of the hazard year, so in case we do have to do any sort of activations, people have a frame of reference and it’s still close in their memory—as opposed to, ‘Geez, we did something three years ago. How did that go again?’”
The exercise also trained staff on how to use the city’s Rapid Damage Assessment Tool, which won an Emergency Management Exemplary Service Award from Public Safety Canada. The tool uses census and tax data to quickly identify damaged properties and displaced residents, helping streamline resource allocation and recovery efforts.
As a result of the training, officials found they can teach someone how to use the tool in roughly 90 minutes to two hours.
“It just gives us the ability to plan ahead, which is important in these kinds of responses,” Pickford said. “Whether they’re tornadoes, floods, hazardous goods, earthquakes—it doesn’t matter.”
With the tornado scenario, dubbed Exercise Supercell, now complete, the city has started planning next year’s emergency simulation, which will focus on a train derailment involving hazardous goods.
“It’s one of the threats to our municipality,” Pickford said.
He also emphasized the importance of personal preparedness in addition to the city’s planning.
“A lot of this stuff starts with residents being able to pick up and go,” he said. “It’s a lot harder than it sounds, when you have all the stuff that you need spread all over the place. So it’s always good to have your kits built and be prepared to go.”
