The Town of Creston is considering applying for a $40,000 grant to update its evacuation plan, which staff said is now outdated.
The funding would be provided through the Union of B.C. Municipalities evacuation planning and public notification funding stream and would fully cover the cost of hiring a consultant to undertake the work.
Emergency management and climate readiness co-ordinator Asha DeLisle told councillors the current plan, developed in 2020 with the Regional District of Central Kootenay, no longer reflects current provincial standards.
“It is outdated mostly because it predates EMCR,” said DeLisle, referring to the provincial Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness, which was established in 2022.
“So there are a number of new templates and checklists and things like that that just don’t align any longer.”
The proposed changes would include new mapping, evacuation route analysis and public notification strategies.
“It will consider roads, it’ll consider bottlenecks and it will help us with some new templates and checklists and include the new sole templates, for example, state-level emergency templates – so a little bit more than what’s in our existing plan,” said DeLisle.
Mayor Arnold DeBoon noted Creston faces unique evacuation challenges due to its geography, with multiple exit routes depending on the type of emergency.
“We have an interesting situation here because depending on the emergency, we could evacuate north, south, east, or west. We’re not limited because we have roads that go in each direction. So depending on the emergency, I think it’s quite a bit to figure out.”
The updated plan would also continue to use a zone-based approach, which DeLisle said would allow for partial evacuations rather than requiring the entire community to leave all at once.
“So when you evacuate, it’s likely that the whole town’s not going to be evacuated,” she said.
“It might just be a corner here or a corner there. So you definitely want to have a good idea of what that looks like. Even in those areas where the bottlenecks are, like there are a number of places that are going to have one road in and out. So that’s the type of thing that this plan will consider.”
However, she said key provincial regulations under B.C.’s Emergency and Disaster Management Act have yet to be released, which could affect how municipalities structure their plans.
“The regulations for this specifically are not out yet, they may be out next year, So there’s an opportunity to wait and update the plan later, though funding may not be available,” she said.
“It’s hard to say and I don’t know what those updates will look like. So we might not be in compliance depending on what the regulations come up with.”
If the town is successful in securing the grant funding, the project would run from early to late 2027.
Council directed staff to bring forward a formal resolution for consideration of the grant application at a later meeting.
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