Canada has just marked the five-year anniversary of the costliest insured natural disaster in its history - the Fort McMurray wildfire.
On May 01, 2016, a wildfire sparked in a forest in the outskirts of Fort McMurray, Alberta, and thanks to bone-dry forests acting as kindling for the blaze, it quickly spiralled out of control. Within hours, the fire crept menacingly close to residential and commercial Fort McMurray, and, by May 03, it had engulfed approximately 2,400 homes in the area and about 590,000 hectares of land. In total, the fire caused nearly $4 billion in insured damages.
Nicknamed ‘The Beast’ for its sheer size and ferocity, the Fort McMurray wildfire resulted in the largest mass evacuation in Alberta’s history, and launched one of Canada’s most exhaustive coordinated first response efforts. FIRST ONSITE Property Restoration was one such company to get involved in remediation, sending 1,500 personnel to support first responders, citizens and local businesses.
Jim Mandeville (pictured), senior project manager - large loss North America, at First Onsite, was on the ground in Fort McMurray providing restoration efforts. As someone who has spent their entire career and adult life responding to large-scale catastrophe events around the continent, he said the Fort McMurray wildfire “still sticks out” because of its scope and scale.
“We went into Fort McMurray only a couple of days after the evacuation of the residents, and I still remember driving in there and seeing the smoke in the distance when we were still 100km away from town,” he reflected. “Then being in the city when it was evacuated, assisting the first responders and driving around what was a relatively large place at that time, with a population of 85,000-90,000 people, when it was completely abandoned, was a very surreal feel for a place in Canada. I’d never experienced anything like that in this country before.
“It felt very much like a zombie apocalypse. We see widespread evacuations like that sometimes in the US with hurricanes, but they generally only last a few days to a week, but this lasted for almost a month, with the entire city being empty. And it’s not like you can just go to the next town five minutes down the road and there were people there. Because of the geography and where Fort McMurray is, it’s an almost five-hour drive to a big grocery store.”
First Onsite’s initial role was to support the first responders in providing some air filtration, technology and assistance to ensure they had environments where they could sleep, rest, and eat without having to wear a respirator because of the smoke. As the event progressed, the group moved on to assisting critical businesses to clean up and get restocked so that when it came time to reoccupy the town, the residents would have somewhere to buy groceries, they could get money at the bank, and fuel at the gas station. Upon re-occupancy, First Onsite moved into assisting residents and other non-critical businesses with their recovery.
“A key takeaway for businesses is that preparedness definitely leads to faster recovery,” Mandeville told Insurance Business. “This is something that we were preaching long before Fort McMurray, and we continue to discuss as much as we can with our partners and our customers. The companies in Fort McMurray that had recovery and contingency plans in place, and they had partner restoration firms and responders in place prior to the event, recovered much quicker than the businesses that didn’t. Failing to plan for natural disasters in advance and reacting after the fact can be extremely detrimental to a business in the long-term and could potentially spell the end of that business.”
There are lots of things that businesses can do to prepare for wildfires. The most commonly prescribed mitigation technique is defensible space, which means being fire smart and clearing or significantly reducing the fuels located immediately around the structures on a property.
“Removing or reducing the opportunity for a fire to burn in close proximity to a structure significantly reduces the opportunity for that fire to migrate on to or into the structure,” explained Tom Larsen, content strategy principal for CoreLogic Insurance and Spatial Solutions. “While defensible space is a great and often effective first step to reduce wildfire risk, other types of mitigation are nearly always necessary to minimize wildfire risk.
“Fires that move along the ground and burn up to the exterior of a structure are only half the problem. The other source of structure ignitions is fires farther from the structure which produce wind-blown embers that land on the structure. A few examples of ember-focused mitigation include: capping the ends of tile roofs to prevent embers from finding a way under the tiles and igniting the roofing material; for homes that have vents into the attic, placing wire mesh over those vents can prevent larger embers from directly entering the attic space and igniting the home from the inside; and cleaning debris from roofs and gutters can eliminate any opportunity for embers to ignite small pockets of flammable materials on roofs.”
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For commercial entities, business continuity plans are key to disaster preparedness. Mandeville stressed that businesses need to have plans in place to ensure employee safety in the event of catastrophe, and to enable them to operate remotely if they are displaced from their homes and/or their usual place of work.
The COVID-19 pandemic has actually helped with this. Mandeville explained: “We’d seen, prior to COVID, an incremental increase in businesses being nimbler and allowing their employees to work from home or from other places. I think COVID has really accelerated that, potentially by years, and I think that will come a long way in the event of mass evacuations or natural catastrophes where businesses have already had a dry run with COVID.
“A lot of companies now have procedures and software in place to enable remote working. I think that will go a long way for a lot of businesses, but they still need to have a plan in place on how they’re going to execute that in the event of a natural disaster. At least this way, they have some experience and some tech, but they still need plans and procedures in place to ensure effective execution. I always stress that natural disasters can spell the end of a business if they’re not properly prepared.”
