KUUJJUAQ — The First Air flight 6560 crash in Resolute Bay last month was “a wake-up call” for Nunavik to improve its local emergency response services, says the head of the Kativik Regional Government’s transport department.
Jack Papak, speaking Sept. 14 at the KRG council meeting in Kuujjuaq, called the Resolute Bay crash a “wake-up call” for the region.
“It was very obvious that we’re not prepared for any type of crash, whether it was off-shore on in land,” Papak said. “This should be an alarm call.”
After the Boeing 737-200C crashed into a hill just outside of the High Arctic community Aug. 20, killing 12 and injuring another three, many questioned the ability of Arctic-based search and rescue to respond to such disasters in a timely way.
At this week’s meeting of KRG regional councillors in Kuujjuaq, many councillors questioned how Nunavik would have responded to a similar scenario.
“Airplanes are coming every day and they’re always full of passengers. What would happen if a plane crashed in or outside a Nunavik community,” Salluit regional councillor and firefighter Michael Cameron said Sept. 14 at the KRG meeting. “If a plane went down outside of town, how would we be able to reach the site with our fire trucks? I think it’s time that we start training for a plane crash.”
Although Transport Canada requires Nunavik to update its emergency response exercises once a year, Cameron said Nunavik must better define who assists in an emergency – and how.
At the time of the August First Air crash, Resolute Bay was hosting an annual training exercise of the Canadian Forces and had hundreds of military personnel on site.
But on a normal day, the emergency response to a Nunavik plane crash or disaster would be far away, deployed from the Canadian Forces’ Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Trenton, Ont., thousands of kilometres away.
The Canadian Coast Guard, depending on the site of a disaster and the time of year, could also assist in marine search and rescue efforts.
Nunavik’s emergency co-ordination centre, which co-ordinates different emergency responders out of Kuujjuaq’s airport, is responsible to respond to emergencies within an eight-kilometre radius around the community.
The centre dispatches the community’s different emergency responders — firefighters, police and medical personnel — to the scene of an accident.
But even those services are limited.
Kuujjuaq’s airport used to have its own specialized firefighter squad, as provided for by Transport Canada, until budget cuts cancelled the program in the early 1990s.
Within Canada, airport firefighting is strongly regulated and requires specialized equipment, similar to that on the ground with Operation Nanook last August in Resolute Bay.
But Nunavik’s current teams of firefighters are considered structural firefighters, which means their focus is fighting fires in houses and other buildings.
Once Nunavik’s firefighters go through the current training process to be internationally certified, the KRG’s civil security said it would like to offer advance training that would cover airport firefighting.
But that’s several years off.
Civil security officials in Nunavik have also been in talks with the Canadian Coast Guard about helping the region improve its own marine search and rescue capabilities, with the goal of Nunavik becoming an auxiliary Coast Guard one day.
Kuujjuaq mayor and regional councillor Paul Parsons encouraged the KRG’s civil security and transport departments to push the Coast Guard to better safeguard the region’s waterways, by doing more mapping and adding safety equipment to well-travelled routes like the Koksoak River.
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