Correspondence: Letter from D. & J. Bee

Subject: View Royal Response to Tsunami Warning on January 23, 2018

We would like to congratulate the View Royal (VR) staff & volunteers who responded quickly to the January 23, 2018 early morning tsunami alert and commend all involved for their efforts to protect our community. We are especially grateful that we didn’t experience the power and destruction of an actual tsunami in VR.

The VR website states that “based on the warnings from Emergency Management BC, View Royal Fire selected homes closest to the water in the lowest lying areas to notify first, and therefore, as a precaution, included the homes on Caton, Werra, and Christie Point areas,” where there were fire trucks & door to door notifications.

We live in the Chancellor Ave and St. Giles St community in VR, with an extremely low lying waterfront area on Portage Inlet. It is in the tsunami zone (with designated signage to that affect). Our neighbourhood wasn’t notified !! A little surprising as the fire trucks notifying residents at Christie Point must have seen our homes across the inlet. If this had been a real tsunami the lives of our families would have been at extreme risk. Why weren’t we notified?

We recognize the View Royal evacuation was a precautionary one based on the warnings from Emergency Management BC. However this situation has provided an opportunity for the Mayor, Councillors of View Royal, and Chief of the Fire Department, to assess the town’s preparedness for a tsunami and/or other emergency, as there are some very important lessons to be learned from this experience and adjustments to be made to ensure VR residents are safe in future tsunami/emergency risks.

It is with the lives and safety of our families in mind, that we are asking all of you as our elected representatives to ensure that action is immediately taken to review and update View Royal’s tsunami and emergency processes, procedures, and communication strategies. In line with this, we have identified the following issues and recommended the following corrective actions:

Issues and Required Actions:

1. Issue: - VR staff & elected officials seem unaware of how unprepared they were for the Jan 23/18 tsunami emergency. They are communicating publicly that it was well handled, when many neighbourhoods were not warned and left in harms way. Required action: Conduct a careful assessment of what worked, what didn’t, and where improvements are required to establish an effective emergency preparedness protocol for VR.

2. Issue: - Most of the homes on Chancellor Ave & St Giles St are in one of the lowest lying tsunami areas in VR. They are right next to the water on Portage Inlet, yet they weren’t considered by VR as one of “the lowest lying areas to receive first notice” of a tsunami alert. It is possible that other neighbourhoods were also overlooked. Required Action: - A complete & accurate list of all low lying homes at risk in a tsunami & ensure VR staff keep it current, to ensure families are quickly notified of dangers and the need to evacuate as well as enabling emergency crew to track and monitor impending risks/dangers and completeness of evacuation.

3. Issue: - VR residents are not aware of how they will be notified of a tsunami risk (or any other emergency), evacuation procedures/sites, or VR communications strategy. Required action: - Establish & maintain emergency operations processes, procedures and a supporting communications strategy and publicize them clearly to the VR community at greatest risk.

4. Issue: - This recent emergency was in the middle of the night when families were together in their homes. However, if it had happened when families were split up at work, schools, etc, what would the protocol be with schools, transit etc? Required action: Establish a standardized emergency protocol with schools and other relevant institutions and communicate it to the VR community.

5. Issue: - VR doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel when updating and developing emergency processes & procedures. Other local towns, municipalities & CRD have well established emergency preparedness process & procedures that were extremely successful during their emergency response on Jan. 23, 2018. Required action: Conduct a review of emergency preparedness best practices in the surrounding municipalities and Districts, then use them to develop & “maintain current and relevant emergency plans for our municipality” (as per the statement on the VR website).

6. Issue: — There is no indication of the funds allocated to Emergency Preparedness in the budget statements available on VR website. A dedicated budget is required to establish & maintain an effective Emergency Preparedness Operations and figures should be made available to the public. Required action: Ensure that a dedicated line in VR budget identifies the budget for emergency preparedness and include this in the budget summary on the website.

We realize that, ultimately, we have the responsibility as an individual household to be prepared for an emergency, and we are planning to create processes as a Chancellor – St Giles Community to help make this happen as efficiently and effectively as possible. We are a diverse neighbourhood of over 20 families including small children, elderly and infirm seniors, and live-in grandparents who don't speak English. However we cannot respond and help ourselves if we are not alerted quickly and efficiently to a tsunami or other natural disaster.

We look forward to this matter being on the Agenda for discussion at the next Council meeting.

Sincerely,

Deborah Bee & Jeff Bee

120 Chancellor Ave View Royal

P.S. We can't imagine what we would be experiencing today if the tsunami had hit us in the early morning of Jan. 23/18. Would one or both of us be alive, dead or injured? How would we be living, eating, or communicating with our families? Please take a leadership role by acting immediately on our concerns and suggested actions. Please enable us to respond to a tsunami or other disaster with an efficient alert system. This will allow us to help ourselves and the other families in our neighbourhood.