St. Albert council will soon consider a new emergency plan that includes a secret plan on how to evacuate the city.
The St. Albert Emergency Advisory Committee voted Aug. 25 to recommend city council approve the updated Community Emergency Management Plan.
St. Albert’s current emergency management plan dates to 2022. The province requires municipalities to review such plans annually, and recently required communities to include mitigation and evacuation plans in such documents.
In an email interview, city emergency management manager Mark Pickford (who recently won an award for emergency management) said this rewrite incorporates lessons the city learned from five recent training exercises and two actual emergencies (the train derailment and Northwest Territories evacuation of last year).
“This update reflects what we’ve learned, so we’re not just planning ‘in theory,’ but preparing based on real experience.”
This shift is reflected in the plan’s overall tone, Pickford continued. The old plan was more theoretical and aspirational, laying out a framework for how to respond to an emergency. The new one is more operational and focuses on what the city actually does in a crisis.
“It is practical, experience-driven, and built to guide action in real time,” he said.
Focus and secrecy
The new plan sets out specifics for emergency training and clear roles for city council and administration. It also sets the director of emergency management as the commander of any emergency response, with the mayor acting as the sole source of updates to the public.
Pickford said it’s vital in emergencies to channel all messages through a central person (the mayor) to keep up with the pace of events. That didn’t happen in recent disasters in Edson and Jasper, resulting in confusion as officials briefed media on situations that had already changed. Under this plan, incident commanders will prepare updates based on the latest information from agents on the ground for the mayor to send out. The plan specifies that updates should be regular, clear, and concise to avoid message fatigue, and should go out through many forms of media.
Annex E of the plan contains the official evacuation plan for St. Albert. It was considered confidential and not made available to the Gazette. The province requires municipalities to prepare evacuation plans but does not require them to be posted online.
This secrecy was intentional, as revealing routes, procedures, and staging areas could expose weak points and threaten public safety, Pickford said. Published plans can also go out of date fast, causing confusion — a plan that says “go north” doesn’t work if there’s a wildfire on that side of town.
“Rather than post something that may quickly be outdated, we focus on giving the public the most accurate instructions at the time of the emergency through trusted channels,” Pickford said.
If an evacuation did happen in St. Albert, Pickford said the city would use emergency alerts, the Know Your Zone website, and other channels to tell residents where to go. He encouraged residents to have a 72-hour go bag ready and to watch the Know Your Zone website in case they have to get out fast.
A draft of the revised plan can be found in the agenda package for the Aug. 25 emergency advisory committee meeting on the city’s website. City council is scheduled to vote on the revised plan Sept. 16.
Information on how to prepare for an emergency can be found at stalbert.ca/city/eps/preparedness.
