Evacuees ordered to leave Jasper Monday night because of wildfires threatening the town and national park began arriving at reception centres in Alberta on Tuesday.
Jasper evacuees are being directed to three cities: Grande Prairie, Calgary, and Edmonton.
Edmonton’s evacuation site is the Kennedale Building #2 (12814 58 Street). Support will be available 24/7, with evacuees receiving coordination of lodging, funding for food, water, clothing, hygiene items, pet day care and health care.
CityNews spoke to Rob Brekke, an emergency management officer with City of Edmonton, at the centre on Tuesday afternoon.
Brekke: What you’re in right now is what we refer to as a rest location. So our rapid emergency support terminal. What we’ve done is we’ve taken our historic response to evacuations here from probably 2016 on, and more importantly, the last four activations – three through 2023, and then the first one here earlier this year. And we realized, what’s our main objective? Our main objective here is to try and get people from their displaced location into their temporary residence as quickly as possible.
We have our primary stakeholder here, the Canadian Red Cross, they’ll deal with accommodations, for example. So our process is one where people come in, they get received, they go through our registration process for the City of Edmonton, so they register with us and the province, then they’ll go through an assessment process with Canadian Red Cross, and then from there, right into their hotels. So the amount of time they spend in this rest location is at a bare minimum.
Based on numbers, and those numbers have frequently changed from early morning hours to where we are now earlier this afternoon, where we’re probably starting to see instead of masses come in and buses have hundreds to thousands, where you start to see dribbling and probably 50, 60 at a time and start to increase that way.
Edmonton wasn’t initially an evacuation centre. When did those calls start?
Probably late (Monday) night is when I started the phone calls. And whether or not we’re going to get the trump card and whether they were going to come to Edmonton was here or there, but it was based on the fire and the threat that was going on in Jasper.
In terms of accommodations, what do people get once they get here?
They’ll go through a welcoming or reception. From our perspective, we will account for them and put them into our system, which is now recognized provincially. And then from here, they’ll go into the Red Cross’ process with being assessed and then to a hotel or motel.
Is there anything that Edmontonians can do to help?
No. Right now we’ve asked them, we don’t need it. We’ve got professionals, we’ve done this many times for a number of years. We’ve got it down pat in relation to the team, the emergency response team, and their response is we don’t need volunteers. As far as donations, we’re not really accepting any donations at this time. We do have donations obviously, going to Red Cross and as well, Emergency Support response here in Edmonton. But for this particular evacuation proper, no, we aren’t accepting any donations. They’re not needed at this time.
