N.S. fire chief questions lack of emergency support, alert delay in recent flooding

As questions remain about why Nova Scotia municipalities didn't request an emergency alert during the recent flash flooding, one fire chief says there wasn't enough support from local emergency officials — who don't appear to have followed their own policies.

On July 11, heavy rain fell across western and central Nova Scotia, hitting the Annapolis Valley especially hard. It caused flash flooding that led to a 13-year-old's death in Wolfville and major road damage.

"This is the worst flooding I've seen in my lifetime here," said Jason Ripley, chief of the volunteer fire department in Greenwich, which is just outside Wolfville.

But Ripley said the Kings Regional Emergency Management Office (REMO) never activated its emergency co-ordination centre during the flooding — even though he believed its highest level was justified based on Kings County's own emergency management plan.

That plan states level 1, or full activation, is triggered by a regional disaster with multiple sites, multiple agencies involved and support required, and would have notified the provincial Emergency Management Office (EMO).

"That's one of my big questions, I guess, as to why that didn't occur," Ripley said.

He said conditions started to get bad in his area around 6 p.m. that Thursday. His crew went to calls of flooded basements and driveway washouts — including at the Old Orchard Inn, which had dozens of guests and staff.

He talked with REMO — which serves the four municipalities in Kings County — a few times that evening with updates about what was happening, and requests for sandbags.

But sandbags weren't available, and Ripley said another request to have the province help in closing down some roads wasn't completed because REMO "didn't have any contacts to reach them after-hours." Ripley said he was told to go through his own dispatch centre, which was "extremely overwhelmed."

His message was delayed but public works crews eventually did arrive.

Ripley himself didn't request an emergency alert. He said he only knew what was happening in his small slice of the county, and Kings REMO was responsible for the wider view and when to send alerts.

If the conditions he was seeing were consistent across the county, Ripley said, "it would be my belief that they would then take the reasonable step of issuing the alert."

But the request was never made by Kings, or any other municipality.

Instead, Municipal Affairs Minister John Lohr — who lives in one of the communities hit by the storm — called the provincial EMO at 7:15 p.m. to have more staff come in. That centre took the unusual step to issue an alert at 8:30 p.m. based on information they were getting, warning of flash floods in parts of Digby, Annapolis, Kings and Hants counties.