The BC Government’s Alert Ready emergency system — which could have sent out a mobile alert to every cell phone in the region, as well as cut into radio and TV broadcasts with the evacuation alert — sat silent.
The government only uses it for tsunamis, so this “catastrophic” event did not qualify.
It was up to the City of Abbotsford to get the word out by itself, with its mayor and local emergency officials holding an impromptu press briefing late Tuesday night on the city’s YouTube channel — the makeshift event a far cry from the enormous reach of the provincial government’s largely quiet communications apparatus…
BC promised to expand the Alert Ready system after the summer’s heat dome killed 595 people, and the government found itself under fire for not doing enough to reach out to people before the emergency started to warn them to seek help in cooling centres.
But then the weekend flooding started, and instead of the broadcast system being ready for prime time it was scheduled to undergo a simple “test” message Wednesday (which was later cancelled after the real emergency started).
The province issued a statement late Tuesday night claiming it was “ready and available to issue a broadcast intrusive alert through the Alert Ready system” but that the “City of Abbotsford has indicated that it does not want to issue an alert at this time.”