EMERGENCY RISK REDUCTION

With summer having come and gone, some projects in which I have been engaged are heating up again. Here’s a sample:

In British Columbia, the provincial legislation requires all local governments, large or small, to have emergency plans. Admittedly, some are very robust, and others might simply be captured in an 8 by 11 ½ paper. This is because some local authorities have designated emergency managers and perhaps a team. For others, it’s the fire chief who wears this hat in his ‘spare’ time.  This fits into my niche in agricultural emergencies by assisting each local government in creating an Agricultural Appendix to their emergency plans, so staff can respond more effectively to disasters and emergencies that impact farms or ranches. The challenge is that BC is huge — with scores of districts (i.e. counties) and towns, large and small. It would be a career task for me to reach all local governments in a province the size of California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho combined.  Therefore, I am creating a ‘template’ that the governments can use and adapt to the agriculture and disasters in the localities. My colleague and I are piloting it in eight locations around the province. One location may be heavy on horticulture, another ranching, another dairying. Hopefully, the project will be of use, and I enjoy meeting the down-to-earth farmers and ranchers while traveling into some lovely parts of beautiful BC.

I am also assisting in the development of an emergency plan related to the disruption of feed grain in the Fraser Valley of BC. The genesis of this is interesting. In 2013, Canada had a bumper crop of wheat grain. So why the disruption of feed grain going to farms in the Fraser Valley?  It’s complex, but contributors included the logistics (by rail) of huge grain movements from the prairie; profitable market forces of food grain vs. cheap feed grain; and government legislation forcing large bulk shipments that overlooked the small Fraser Valley market.  The irony was daily, even hourly, train traffic carrying grain into the Fraser Valley, past feed mills on their way to the Vancouver port, and transloaded onto ships primarily for Asia. The result was a disruption, and almost a serious shortage of feed grain to local mills that serve dozens of farms – poultry, dairy, and pork – in the Fraser Valley. My study is to develop a plan to mitigate against a future feed grain disruption and respond effectively if one occurs. The challenge is that there are few durable solutions on the horizon.

Lastly, I am putting together a proposal to create an Emergency Planning Guide for the poultry industry in BC. This would detail emergency measures that should be in place for major disasters that could impact poultry in BC, and prevention or response actions that poultry farmers should consider. This is only a proposal, and so it is on my own time. A reality of being a consultant is that I don’t get paid to put together a proposal. Only after being awarded the project can I charge hours. I can spend days on a proposal, with nothing to show for it if another consultant wins the contract. This happens!  But I am grateful for the ones on which I am working. It gets me up in the morning, with a sense that maybe in a small way, I am making a contribution to emergency preparedness – even if it’s for a small farmer or simple rancher in an isolated BC location, whom I will never have the pleasure of meeting.

Thanks for reading.