Amid the chaos and confusion of Yellowknife’s first ever mass evacuation, by road and by plane, for some strange reason my mind kept visiting the tale of the sinking of the Titanic. It was a rather famous ship which sank on April 12, 1912. That was a long, long, time ago.
Boats, especially passenger boats, have a long history of sinking and drowning a lot of passengers. So a protocol was developed on how to evacuate them. It might even offer some clues on how to evacuate a city, stuck in the middle of a rather flammable boreal forest.
A boat has a captain, and it is the captain’s job to issue an abandon ship order when the appropriate time comes. The ship also has a group of ship’s officers, who look after different aspects of the ship, and they have specific jobs to do during the evacuation. Then there is the crew, which may be several hundred people who work for the ship owners and take a vow or oath to obey orders and do things right. Finally, you have the passengers and on a big ship there could be several hundreds or thousands of them.
The rules of the sea dictate that if a cruise liner springs a leak, runs aground, or hits an iceberg, then the ship’s crew and officers spring into action trying to keep the ship afloat and on an even keel. If things get serious the captain makes the call to abandon ship. Officers and crew go to the lifeboat stations and start to get passengers off the ship in an organized fashion.
It used to be women and children first, but that is probably an outdated concept, so families with children first, along with the elders, seniors, disabled and those needing a hand. While this is happening, some crew members search the ship to make sure everyone knows it is sinking and to get them to the lifeboats. In each lifeboat is a crew that knows how to operate it. The able-bodied leave next. When all the passengers are off the ship, then the crew goes next, followed by the officers and finally, the captain. That is how they try to get everyone off the ship and safely ashore.
There are major differences between abandoning a cruise ship in trouble at sea and evacuating a city of 20,000 people, due to the threat of a forest fire. However, there are also some interesting comparisons that can be made.
To start with, the public, in our case, was getting some very mixed messages and it was difficult to know who oversaw what. States of emergency were declared for the city and for the entire territory. The clock was ticking, the wildfire was getting closer and not a whole lot seemed to be happening to defend the city while we watched and waited.
Rumour had it that some people, including GNWT workers, were leaving the city with or without their supervisors’ permission. Now, imagine you are a passenger on a cruise ship that runs over a reef and starts taking on water. The captain tells everyone not to worry, but you see a bunch of the ship’s officers and crew packing up their stuff and readying the lifeboats so they can leave first. Then the captain suddenly announces everyone should abandon ship, just like the GNWT suddenly announced on Wednesday night that everyone must be out of Yellowknife by noon that Friday.
A great exodus began, with those already packed leading the way, most of whom were GNWT employees, families and friends who knew the announcement was coming. For some reason, seeing this happen made me recall the song by The Band, ‘The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down’, only this was ‘The Night the GNWT Fled The Capital’.
The optics of this were terrible. We can do much better. In the review of the whole shebang, there should be more sensible steps followed for any future evacuations. Let’s get to work on it.