Kamloops acting mayor says city has learned lessons from fire season

Sep 15, 2017 | 4:33 PM

KAMLOOPS — With the province-wide state of emergency about to be lifted, acting mayor Arjun Singh believes Kamloops can learn from the past few months. 

Kamloops became a place of refuge for thousands of wildfire evacuees when the state of emergency was declared on July 7. 

While the city managed to take care of basic needs, Singh says there will be discussions on how to respond to emergency situations with more efficiency. 

“We just really think it’s really something that could become our new normal,” he said. “So, if it is our new normal how can we just make sure we’re adequately planned and resourced to respond?”

Singh says the city would not have been able to respond to such a large scale emergency without the support of hundreds of citizens volunteering their time.

Singh adds he has never been prouder of his city.

“The offers of generosity, the offers of donation, the volunteer hours were just quite incredible, and so you know there was our official people who were sort of staffing stuff, and our employees, our official volunteers if you want to call it that, but huge, huge addition of people who came out of almost nowhere to kind of help out and do various things.”