City of Winnipeg sets up mock Clean Air Centre called Exercise AIR Aware
Posted April 30, 2024 5:53 pm.
There’s an air quality emergency in Winnipeg, that’s exactly what I’d be saying if this wasn’t a test, as the city hosted a daylong exercise simulating what could happen in the event of an air quality emergency, especially with climate change increasing the number of wildfires and smoke hours across Canada.
“There’s really no such thing as a response season anymore, it just keeps on rolling into one another,” said Shawn Feely, the Vice-President for Manitoba and Nunavut, Canadian Red Cross.
The City’s Emergency Social Services team, Canadian Red Cross, and other partner agencies teamed up for the mock Clean Air Centre called Exercise AIR Aware at Sergeant Tommy Prince Place, that saw dozens of volunteers receive support from a variety of services including meet and greets, registration and inquiry, health assessments, and food services, as a way to prepare for actual emergencies since the City has not opened a clean air space in recent history.
“So that’s part of the exercise today is to learn in a simulated environment so it’s not in real-time, so those lessons learned those pieces we can take away we can approve upon if we ever have to implement one, is one of the key learnings from today,” said Mike Olczyk, the emergency management coordinator for the City of Winnipeg.
Vice-President of the Canadian Red Cross for Manitoba and Nunavut Shawn Feely says while providing services for an air quality emergency is new for them, it is very similar to what they do on a regular basis with running reception centres, all that’s needed is a little practice.
“It’s a good exercise for the Red Cross to test our systems, but also experience working with other organizations and levels of government,” said Feely.
Feely says there’s a variability with hazards so there is no way to predict if this will ever be used, but says climate change could play a big factor.
“This year in particular given the dryness of the conditions through winters in a lot of areas across western Canada were hearing from our hazards experts that there the potential for a busy wildfire season,” said Olczyk.
