By Spencer Sterritt

City of Nanaimo staff answer the call for help in B.C. Interior

Jul 25, 2017 | 5:58 PM

NANAIMO — Though wildfires haven’t taken over the City of Nanaimo, several City staff will soon feel the heat.

Four employees are currently at the Cariboo Regional District’s Emergency Operations Centre in Williams Lake to help coordinate efforts on the ground.

Jenn Houtby-Ferguson, a local emergency preparedness consultant, just returned from assisting in the Interior. She primarily helped with communications, making sure families had correct and up-to-date information as their lives went up in flames around them.

“Folks needed to know where to go to get information from a reputable source and not taking information that was hearsay or a rumour or somebody heard something from someone and posted it on Facebook,” she told NanaimoNewsNOW.

She said it was a challenge handling so many families and organizations, but the mostly “resilient” people managed to handle the chaos quite well.

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The key message she told families was to have a family reunification plan, which she said was often overlooked.

“It became really evident in the course of this disaster that there’s people who weren’t at home, they were on vacation because it’s summer time. We had people here on the island in Tofino who were on vacation and couldn’t go back to their home.”

Though it was an exhausting trip to the Interior, Houtby-Ferguson said she expects to be called back and is eager to return.

“There’s still thousands of people who aren’t back in their home and it’s really tough to get in a plane and come back home.”

At the moment, four Nanaimo firefighters have offered to help and are waiting to see where and when they’ll be deployed.

Several firefighters from around the Regional District of Nanaimo are already there.

-with files from Daryl Major

spencer@nanaimonewsnow.com

On Twitter: @spencer_sterrit