Review highlights city's 'limited communications' to public about 2023 evacuation of Yellowknife

The firm tasked with reviewing last summer's wildfire evacuation in Yellowknife said the city could have done more — and could still do more, now — to let the public know about its wildfire preparations. 

KPMG has not yet finished its review of how the city handled the emergency, but was asked to go before city council this week to share its early observations.  

What it presented Monday was a list of coordination and communication-related problems before, during, and after the evacuation was ordered on August 16. Some of those problems persist, KPMG said. 

"There were limited communications to the public and I would say, to date … about what activities the city has been taking to prepare for future events and for this coming season as well," Leon Gaber, KPMG's national lead on critical infrastructure resilience and emergency management practice, told city councillors.

KPMG found that leading up to the evacuation, there wasn't enough coordination between the city and the territorial government about evacuation plans, support for vulnerable people, how volunteers would be organized, and the identification of essential services. 

The city also didn't have a plan for a full-scale evacuation — something officials have acknowledged already, last year.

Gaber said an evacuation plan was "really important," and that it should have laid out evacuation routes, evacuation centres, transportation options, considerations for people with unique needs, and how to accommodate Yellowknife's large population of pets. 

KPMG found some people in the city had advance notice an evacuation would be ordered, and that caused confusion.

KPMG said that once the order did come down, there wasn't a system to track where evacuees went, there was limited coordination with host cities in the South, and there was no direct contact for people trying to provide support to vulnerable populations. 

Some volunteers who stayed behind may have been in situations that were unsafe, KPMG found. There were also challenges getting essential-service providers back into the city early, before the order was lifted, it said. 

John Collins, Yellowknife's outgoing city manager, says he's "quite encouraged" by the review's findings so far. 

"There's nothing on the list that is a surprise to administration. In fact, almost all that is on the list we are already working on in one way, shape or form and have been for some time," he said.

Collins also said many of the areas of identified for improvement were not the city's responsibility, but the territorial government's.

"What this does for us is provide us additional information for the ongoing discussions that we are having with the territorial government, to address some of these important matters," Collins said.