By Cheryl Jahn / CKPG News

Prince George stuck on evacuee registrations

Oct 4, 2018 | 3:35 PM

PRINCE GEORGE, B.C. — Prince George City Hall is becoming increasingly disheartened by the lack of improvements to how Emergency Social Services are handled in light of wildfires. 

“That is something that I’ve been talking about now since 2017,” says Mayor Lyn Hall, who took those concerns to his government following the summer of 2017, when Prince George was home to 10,000 evacuees. The hope was to have something in place for the following fire season. No dive. “Just to streamline that process, make it more automated so that it’s not a manual registration process.”

Jennifer Rice is the Parliamentary Secretary tasked with reviewing the program and says the system was designed for smaller emergencies.

“The ESS Program was not designed to deal with major wildfires like we’ve experienced this year and last. So, of course, the system is not necessarily a good fit for the needs of our communities.”

Hall has met with the government following this fire season, but he has been left with some discouraging news.

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“I’m under the impression that the framework of that automated registration is in place, but the problem is around confidentiality and where that confidential information is housed,” he says. “It looks as if there’s an issue around where [the information] is housed on a particular server either in Canada or in the U.S.”

“I don’t know what the answer is to that,” says Rice. “There are smart legal people who are tackling this. But the end goal is to make [the system] efficient.”

But she was unable to say if such a system could be in place for the next fire season. And that has the Mayor looking elsewhere.

“Could our IT Department create something? The issue with that is is that it probably has to be authorized by the Province. But I’m certainly willing to take that on and see what we can do about it. Obviously, we would want the Province to pony up with some dollars. But if we have that capacity to do it locally, let’s take a look at it.”