B.C.'s 'Best Small Town' also leads the pack on planning for multiple climate emergencies

As more rural towns across B.C. are bracing for future natural disasters, one B.C. mayor says every community's brush with an emergency is a chance to prepare for the worst in the future.

"With the disaster in Lytton [B.C.], for example, many, many communities are paying a lot closer attention to this now," said Don McCormick, mayor of Kimberley, a city of more than 8,000 in the East Kootenays. "Because it could happen to us."

His own community's close call came in 2018, a year after Lytton burned to the ground: five years ago, the whole city was put under a wildfire evacuation alert, and residents in one area outside the city were ordered to leave their homes.

"When you've got a wind roaring down that valley … it would not have taken very long for that fire to reach town," he told CBC News in an interview. "Fortunately, nothing happened. 

"But what it did was spur an urgency, on the part of the entire community, to do what we need to do."

Today, one climate disaster planning expert is praising Kimberley as a leader among small towns readying for multiple emergencies.

The city was voted by CBC readers "B.C.'s best small town" in a contest last spring.

With grant funding for climate planning, the city has brought in academics, planning experts, and the province over several decades to think deeper about many of the things that could go wrong — and to take action on them.

"Kimberley was one of the very first," recalled Trevor Murdock, a climate scientist with the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, who helped the town model the climate future in the mid-2000s. "Kimberley was kind of ahead of the game in ... engaging the community itself.

"They had workshops where the public was invited, early on in the process and then later on as well ... to have community buy-in."

Surrounded by forests, with a river flowing through several neighbourhoods, Kimberley planned ahead for fires, floods, chemical plant accidents, sewage spills in their drinking water, evacuations — even a local electricity supply, since the community hosts a major solar power plant.

They educated businesses and residents, and spent considerable time reducing combustible fuels such as coniferous trees in and around town.

"Kimberley had two routes in and out, and both would have been cut off in about eight hours with prevailing winds and a fire," said Stephen Sheppard, director of the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning at the University of British Columbia. "And they had flooding issues … with the creeks.

"Showing that scenario — visualizing what these impacts are before they happen — was crucial and shocking for people. But it urged them into enacting many policies … a whole bunch of adaptation plans on these multiple climate change impacts."