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Emergency Support Services in the North Peace are benefitting from some of the $3.3 million in funding through the Community Emergency Preparedness Fund this month.

According to the Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness, this funding will help communities to expand their ability to provide ESS through volunteer recruitment, retention, training and the purchase of equipment, as well as the modernization of local programming to include digital support.

The City of Fort St. John will receive $30,000 through the CEPF and plans to put the funds towards establishing a permanent Emergency Operations Centre.

“Currently what happens is when we activate our emergency operations centre, we take over the fire hall for example, and it has to be set up. We have to move in and move out,” Ryan Harvey, Fort St. John’s Communications Manager said. “This will allow us a permanent set up to respond to what appears to be ever increasing emergencies.

While Harvey hopes that the number of emergencies won’t increase, he says the city believes it’s important to be prepared. To that end, the city is looking at repurposing a portion of the old RCMP detachment building across from City Hall as the permanent EOC.

He said the funds will also support work on lower-level ESS pieces.

“In the event of a small-scale emergency we don’t need to set up the North Peace Arena as a reception centre when we need just a smaller centre for that.”

Elsewhere in the North Peace, the District of Taylor will be receiving $6,500 through CEPF, which Taylor’s Chief Administrative Officer Moira Green says will go towards sending their network of ESS members to the 2024 Network of Emergency Social Services Teams (NESST) conference in Kamloops.

The NESST conference will provide the teams with multiple training and exercise opportunities over the course of a weekend. Originally an event that was held in Northern British Columbia as an opportunity to bring northern municipalities together for training and networking, NESST has grown to a provincial level as the need for this type of conference has been recognized.

“Our ESS team is very well recognized locally and provincially, because they are dedicated and very well trained,” said Green. Taylor’s teams will go anywhere to help, including the neighbouring communities of Fort St. John and Dawson Creek.

The CEPF helps communities better prepare for and mitigate the impacts of climate-related

emergencies by funding local projects and initiatives in several categories, including

public notification and evacuation-route planning, emergency-operations centre equipment and training, and disaster-risk reduction.