Emergency Planning

Kelli Kryzanowski describes herself as “a bit of an adrenaline junkie,” which is certainly a relevant qualification in the emerging field of emergency management.

Currently, she is the manager of catastrophic disaster planning and community recovery at Emergency Management British Columbia, which falls under the purview of the B.C. Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General.

She first started at her current position in 2005. Prior to this, she worked for eight years with the Canadian Red Cross coordinating volunteer responses to many global tragedies, including 9-11 and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.

Perhaps not surprisingly, she came to the Red Cross after cutting her teeth as one of the few female forest fighters in B.C. in the early 1990s. Why is she seemingly always on the scene of a disaster, ready to lend a helping hand?

“It started through my concern for international affairs and what I saw going on in the world with major disasters in other places,” she says. “Ever since I was a little girl, my heart always broke when I saw people suffering after emergencies and disasters and that’s where my connection with the Red Cross really came from, too.”

Kryzanowski joined the Canadian Red Cross in the late 1990s, seizing the opportunity during an “off-season” in the firefighting field. She worked with the Red Cross for eight years; in that time, she completed her Master’s degree in International Development. While at the Red Cross, she acted as coordinator for the humanitarian issues program (HIP), in which youth looked at issues such as the social impact of international armed conflicts.

She also helped coordinate volunteer and fundraising efforts. This included a volunteer response to the damage caused in New York in 2001, when two hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Centre, killing more than 5,000 people. The Disaster Operations Volunteer Escapees (DOVE) program sent Red Cross volunteers to the site to help victims with things like family reunification. “We sent quite a few volunteers from British Columbia to Red Cross headquarters for 9-11,” Kryzanowski says.

She was also involved in one of the Canadian Red Cross’s largest fundraising events on Vancouver Island following the Indian Ocean Tsunami on Boxing Day in 2004. A 9.1 earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia triggered a powerful tsunami that inundated coastal communities in 14 different countries with waves up to 100 feet high, killing more than 230,000 people.

Kryzanowski visited Phuket, Thailand, among the hardest-hit countries, to survey the damage there. “I was really looking at this issue… of resilience,” she says. “How do communities spring back quickly? Which communities do spring back more quickly, and why?”Kryzanowski credits her experience in Thailand with the background to become a project manager in 2005 for the Tsunami Integrated Preparedness Project (TIPP) in B.C. The Provincial Emergency Program of the Government of B.C established the TIPP project soon after the South Asia tsunami.

“I learned first-hand the incredible power of a tsunami,” she say of her experience in Thailand. “This one was a tele-tsunami because it came across the Indian Ocean to do damage in Indonesia. Seeing that incredible power gave me an understanding of how we need to ensure the people B.C. have the education and knowledge of these [adverse] impacts [of a tsunami], and that we are able to put in place the systems to ensure the safety of British Columbians…

“That’s where I got started really with the province in catastrophic disaster planning.”

An advisory in British Columbia following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Honshu, Japan tested B.C. residents’ preparedness for a tsunami. The province’s Provincial Emergency Notification [PEN] System sent out 1,000 calls, 400 faxes and 400 emails, all in about 40 minutes, notifying emergency program coordinators, the media, RCMP and ambulance drivers that a tsunami could happen.

Some communities responded well. Other responses suggested a gap in communication around tsunamis. For example, people need to be aware that they have to respond quickly to tsunami threats, particularly in the instance of a near-shore tsunami.

“In a near-shore tsunami, people need to know that when the ground shakes for more than a minute or so, they need to drop, cover and hold,” she says. “When the earthquake stops, they need to pick themselves up and start running for higher ground. A lot of people are thinking they need to wait for a siren to go off, or for somebody to come and knock on their door and tell them to get moving. The education we need to get out there is that you just really need to get yourself out and get moving.”

Kryzanowski is now handling B.C.’s seismic emergency management portfolio, which includes earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes. In this role, she helped with The Great British Columbia ShakeOut, modeled after the ShakeOut program in California. Supported by the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC), the program was the largest earthquake drill in Canada, with more than 400,000 participants.

The drill made clear that in the event of an earthquake, people should simply drop down immediately, cover themselves with a solid object such as a table or a desk, and hold onto the object covering them for the duration of the shaking. The key is to avoid the panic instinct to leave the building, Kryzanowski says.

“People think they should get out of a building because they think it is going to collapse,” she says. “But our building codes in North America are such that buildings rarely, rarely ever pancake. Most people are killed or injured when they are trying to get out of a building during the earthquake.”

When asked about the role of insurance in emergency management, Kryzanowski noted the IBC has been working hard to educate B.C. residents about the importance of understanding their coverage prior to a disaster occurring. Some may not be aware, for example, that earthquake is covered by way of endorsement and not automatically in their homeowners’ policies. This is something the industry may wish to discuss, Kryzanowski says.

“One of the things we always wonder about here in B.C. in particular is that you have to ask for earthquake insurance,” she says. “We’d love to see earthquake insurance become automatic and you would have to ask not to have it.”

Insurers do have a role in making the public aware of the need to purchase earthquake coverage. “The government does assist with the disaster financial assistance program, but we don’t with insurable perils like earthquakes or fires. So really, [insurers should be] encouraging their clients to have earthquake insurance, I think.”

Also, she noted, insurers and adjusters may want to keep up their knowledge about emergency social services and how the emergency management system works.