Buildng up Cortes Island's Emergency Preparedness Systems
Cortes Currents
English - April 05, 2021 12:11 - 7 minutes - 17.7 MBNews cortes island discovery islands quadra food security energy indigenous nations Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Roy L Hales / Cortes Current - The Strathcona Regional District (SRD) is building up Cortes Island’s emergency preparedness systems and this requires money. They have already received a $65,000 Community Resiliency grant this year, for things like wood chipping, more intense training training for the Cortes Island Fire Department and hiring a consultant to help neighbourhoods prepare wildfire threat assessment reports.There is more coming. SRD Protective services Coordinator Shaun Koopman explained they have applied for another $265,000 of funding.
Received to date for 2021: $65,000
Community Resiliency Investment grant received to
-Develop wildfire fuel prescriptions
-Provide free driveway woodchipping
-Assess structural protection and wildfire capacity response capacity (report on Cortes Island)
-Provide Incident Command System and Fire Entrapment and Avoidance training for the Cortes Island Fire Department
-Hire a professional FireSmart consultant to work with neighbourhoods and develop Neighbourhood Wildfire Threat Assessment Reports with them
Further Applications: $265,066
Emergency Support Services – (results known end of April) - $5,000 for post-earthquake supplies for Cortes Island.
Sea Level Rise Mapping – (results known end of May) - on both Cortes and Quadra. Koopman says it is ‘hard to ballpark how much money would go to each island, but you could put $75,000 for Cortes.’ The We Wai Kai and Klahoose First Nations provided letters of support for this grant application.
FireSmart Economic Recovery - $185,066 for Cortes Island (critical infrastructure wildfire risk reduction and fuel treatment by Recycling Centre)