The tragedy in Haiti has put my heart and mind through the proverbial ringer. One of the outcomes has been to re-examine how we plan for disasters in the North. What kinds of disasters could we anticipate? Nothing on the scale of the Haitian earthquake - we just don't have the population up here.
However, it doesn't take millions of injured people to make a disaster. If only 10% of the 20 000 people who live in Yellowknife required immediate emergency care, we could easily be overwhelmed. There are many ways this could happen.
We had to plan for this during the H1N1 epidemic. Had the virus been more virulent and many people required hospitalization we would have needed to use the schools as hospital wards. The same kind of problem would arise with contamination of the water system.
Another of the possibilities for a disaster scenario involves climate change. What if there was a period of prolonged abnormal cold? What if there was no power during that period? There would be no heat, no water and only frozen food.
As one designs disaster, mass casualty and code orange policies, it's hard not to realize that any of these events are likely to result in a very chaotic response. The amount of inter-agency communication required to build a complete plan is astounding. In the end it will be the communication systems that are used during a disaster that makes or breaks the quality of the response.
