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is something we have to think of not just for 2018 but for every day in the future as far as we can look ahead," said Abbott. Abbott and Chapman's report also recommended strengthening public understanding of the risks and personal responsibilities associated with living in a fire-dependent ecosystem. In response, Emergency Management B.C. launched EmergencyMapBC, a powerful tool to keep the public informed and safe by serving as a general reference for current public safety conditions during emergencies. Creating safer, less vulnerable communities in 'the new normal' of increased wildfires requires a modern approach to understanding threats and hazards that are more complex, costly and devastating than ever before. Agencies around the world rely geospatially during this crisis and, "three to four hundred more users were added during the response with no problem". At peak activity, over 4,700 people were involved in fighting wildfires across B.C., including 2,000 contract personnel from the forest industry and over 1,200 personnel from outside the province. This support came from across Canada, as well as from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and the United States. Ground personnel from the Canadian Armed Forces were also brought in to fight fires for the first time since 2003. Thousands of people who had never worked together, many of whom didn't even know the region very well, had to coordinate efforts. With all the information in the cloud, Singh's group could easily grant access to vital information to multiple levels of government (federal, provincial, First Nations, regional, and local), commercial and utility organizations and non- governmental organizations (NGOs) in a matter of minutes. The maps they provided were constantly being updated. "Web- based maps makes integration of other data much easier," Singh says, which means that collaboration is much easier too. Using web-based maps, an emergency management 'common operating picture' (COP) was developed. The COP allowed local governments and First Nations across the province to have shared situational awareness of the fires while still using their own data and tools. They all saw the value of sharing information among various levels of governments during an event, and the COP portal has since helped to establish standards, guidelines and best practices for sharing data, information and tools to support a common situational awareness during emergency events. Ben Arril, Singh's COP Lead at GeoBC, says "the COP, has become a centroid to our emergency GIS support system. It provides a reliable mechanism to convey spatial emergency information quickly to multiple incident command units and emergency management partners." And a successful emergency response hinges upon government agencies' ability to make timely decisions on resource allocation. When the crisis passed, B.C. Liberal MLA George Abbott and First Nations Chief Maureen Chapman co-chaired the strategic review of the province's response. After touring damaged areas and meeting with those affected by the floods and fires, they recommended the province establish Emergency Centres of Excellence in interior locations and build a hub website for emergency communications. "2017 was not a one-off and something that will go away, it on cloud computing every day to plan for and mitigate complex threats and hazards and coordinate response and recovery efforts when disasters and emergencies occur. As more areas across Canada face extreme weather—Hurricane Dorian required Nova Scotia Power to coordinate a variety of emergency responders from outside the province—the necessity of immediate collaboration will become not a matter of 'someday' moving vital infrastructure data to the cloud, but how to start doing it today. David Hamilton is the Public Safety Industry Manager for Esri Canada. Innovation The Provincial Emergency Coordination Centre in August 2017. Below: The cloud- based platform dashboard used by the BC Government, which stores long- term data that helps understand how to respond to flood emergencies. Credit: B.C. Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure Credit: GeoBC, FLNRORD March/April 2020 ReNew Canada 27 renewcanada.net

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