Timeline of Upper Tantallon wildfire shows how long it took to send emergency alerts

The Upper Tantallon wildfire began on a beautiful, hot Sunday afternoon.

The date was May 28. Many residents were away from home, maybe at the beach or with loved ones, and were likely checking their phones less than usual.

By the time an emergency alert was issued at 5:13 p.m., telling residents of Westwood Hills to evacuate, homes in the subdivision had been burning for more than an hour and a half.

"Honestly, I would say it's slow," said Erica Fleck, director of emergency management for the municipality, about the gap. 

"But again not having all of the data and looking at it, you know … we'd have to verify that, obviously."

CBC News has constructed a timeline of how the first few hours of the wildfire unfolded, with information from Halifax Regional Municipality, the provincial Emergency Management Office (EMO) and Nova Scotia RCMP.

The fire led to evacuation orders for about 16,400 residents — stretching from Upper Tantallon to Sackville — and destroyed 151 homes.

At 3:29 p.m., RCMP were called to help Halifax Fire fight a blaze that was spreading in the woods near Juneberry Lane in Westwood Hills.

Sometime between then and 3:40 p.m., officers began going door-to-door telling residents to leave. 

At 4 p.m., RCMP posted messages on their Facebook and Twitter pages asking Westwood residents to immediately evacuate their homes along a certain route — but they used the wrong street name. The post also said an emergency alert from the Emergency Management Office would be issued "imminently." 

That did not happen.

Spokesperson Cpl. Chris Marshall said the posts were deleted on June 1 to "avoid confusion" because the municipality had been making frequent posts about evacuations "and the information in the tweets were no longer current."

When asked why RCMP could not have issued their own alert, since they have that power, Marshall said they only do so for police-led incidents, not "natural disasters" like a wildfire.