Nathalie Sturgeon, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Saint Croix Courier

Silent Blaze is a two-part investigation by The Courier and CHCO-TV. This is Part I. 

New documents reveal the Department of Justice and Public Safety believed door-to-door notification and a Sentinel system alert were enough during a raging forest fire that forced several hundred people from their homes in May 2023, which is why it didn’t issue an Alert Ready emergency message. 

The forest fire started on May 28, 2023, when an ATV caught fire in the woods off South Glenelg Road in Chamcook, just outside Saint Andrews. Firefighters and emergency officials went door-to-door and issued a notice through the town’s subscription-based Sentinel system.

At the time, the town was in the process of moving away from the Sentinel system, which was designed for Saint Andrews proper, not surrounding areas like Bocabec and Chamcook, where the fire was quickly spreading due to high winds, dry conditions and hot temperatures. 

The Alert Ready system – designed to broadcast emergency messages through televisions, radios and cell phones – was never used. 

In response to questions by reporters, the public safety minister at the time said the fire did not meet the criteria. 

“It has to meet the criteria of the national Alert Ready system and unfortunately this one didn’t,” Kris Austin said, according to a transcript of his response. 

Austin said at the time he asked about why one wasn’t issued, adding “I am going to follow back with the department to dig in a little deeper on that eligibility and ensure it is being utilized the way it’s supposed to be utilized.” 

On the Alert Ready website, however, examples are provided for the use of the system. Under the table Alert Types, there is a section for fire. 

It categorizes them into four categories: industrial fire, urban fire, wildfire and forest fire. Each has a small blurb for what the alert could be used for. In the case of Bocabec and Chamcook, a relatively rural area, it would have fallen under either wildfire or forest fire, but most likely forest fire. 

“A forest fire is a wildfire or prescribed fire that is burning in a forested areas, grass or alpine/tundra vegetation and poses a threat to human safety,.” said the Alert Ready website. 

The forced evacuation in the Saint Andrews area lasted several days, threatening both homes and people. There were roughly 200 people evacuated, according to the Saint Andrews Fire Department. 

There was a significant response from the Department of Natural Resources, NB RCMP, the Department of Justice and Public Safety and NB Emergency Measures, as well as several fire departments from Charlotte County, including Saint Andrews.

Kyle Leavitt, the director of the New Brunswick Emergency Measures Organization (EMO), said in the early hours of the forest fire that the agency was ready to help coordinate the situation. 

“We base everything off what we describe as the four pillars of emergency management:, mitigation, prevention, preparation, response and then recovery,” he said, speaking with The Courier. “So, really, when we get into that response cycle, we’re going through set steps within our crew and everything moves along.”

He confirmed that the decision to evacuate residents was made locally.

‘We didn’t have enough information’ 

Email exchanges obtained through a Right to Information and Protection of Privacy Act request showed the province felt it didn’t have enough information to issue an Alert Ready notification. 

An early email from Matt Steeves to several employees in the Department of Justice and Public Safety, in response to a media request from Global News, said the website shows what the system could be used for, but isn’t criteria. 

“As an aside, the Alert Ready website describes the type of alerts that should be considered for broadcasting but it does not state any criteria to do so,” it reads. “The criteria is situation dependent and the decision made by the local government with either the RCMP and NB Emergency Measures Organization in support by sending in the Alert.” 

No criteria was ever released from the department and none was included in the documents. 

An email from Andrew Easton, with the Department of Justice and Public Safety, in a response to a request from Global News, said that the department “needed to provide a factual basis of what happened to ensure we explain what did happen,” on whether Austin mis-spoke about the criteria. 

“I was asked this by the Premier as well, and explained that an alert has to tell the public what to do about the risk and we didn’t have enough detail from the scene to explain that (i.e., it’s a bad idea to tell people to evacuate to the west if you are east of the fire). 

There was also confusion about the town’s use of Sentinel, an alert-based system that people have to subscribe to. At the time, officials from the town said it was transitioning away from that software. 

“Also: I need to understand details of what was done by the town re: alerting using sentinel,” said another email from Andrew Easton to EMO’s Kyle Leavitt, Geoffrey Downey, Cathy Mallet and Judy Desalliers. “This ‘had to remove one of the broadcast messages right before the fire limiting it’s reach’ seems to suggest it was not used.” 

“I understood it was and that it was determined by our REMC (regional emergency measures coordinator) and Ops (operations) staff at the time that the combination of local alerting and door-to-door resulted in a determination an Alert Ready wasn’t needed,” the email said. 

It also suggested the town never asked for the Alert Ready system to be used, but Bocabec – and the area where the fire was located – was still under the jurisdiction of the Department of Local Government. 

Saint Andrews Mayor Brad Henderson said he was never contacted by the province to issue an Alert Ready message.

“There was no official that ever called me that evening to say, ‘What do you think?’” he said in an interview with The Courier. “I will say that when it was time to tell people to return home, I was consulted then, but the night of, there was no consultation whatsoever, as far as I know.” 

Henderson said he couldn’t speak to whether Fire Chief Kevin Theriault was consulted on an alert, but was told the chief did notify the province before even leaving the fire station. 

He explained it was at least 24 hours after the fire started before anyone from the province communicated with the town about the situation. 

“The decision to evacuate all those homes was (made) by the people that were out in the field,” Henderson said. “There was no office in Fredericton that reviewed it. There was nothing like that because there was a little bit of a concern at the time.” 

He said there was no explanation to the town of how the Alert Ready system worked. 

“As far as I know, there was no call like, ‘Hey, do you need an emergency alert? Do you need anything like that?’” he said. “There was no process in place where anyone ever reached out to offer us any assistance. So, we had to take it in our own hands and figure it out the way that we could.”

He explained the town used every platform it had available to it for messaging, including social media, adding he felt like the direction to go to the W.C. O’Neill Arena was clear enough to be included in an Alert Ready message – even if the fire was moving rapidly and unpredictably. 

“That’s why we had hundreds and hundreds of people come to the arena to offer rooms,” he said.  “Everybody in the area certainly knew what we were doing, but I think the key lesson here is do we have to call the province and tell them when they’re supposed to use their own emergency alert system? I don’t have access to the emergency alert system. If I did, would I have used it? Yes, I would have.” 

Leavitt said the department felt that the town’s dissemination of information was enough, reiterating the fire would have had to have met the national criteria. 

“Because of the intrusive nature of it, it really has to meet the criteria that there is an immediate danger – an imminent threat to life and limb,” Leavitt said. in an interview. “So, it has to meet that criteria. That’s why the local officials and authorities on the ground are best positioned to make that call. Once they determine (if) this meets that criteria, then we need to know where the zone is and we need to know what needs to be told to the listeners of the alert or the warning.” 

Henderson is adamant that communication with the province never happened. 

Kevin Quigley is a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax who specializes in risk governance and critical infrastructure protection, focusing in particular on public sector responses to rare and high impact events.

Firefighers continue to put out hot spots for weeks after the blaze was considered under patrol.

Quigley said these situations in the moment are often complex – but there can be fears of overreacting and underreacting. 

He said minutes, even seconds, count in emergency situations. 

“These things have to be done and there is a human dimension to it,” he said in an interview with The Courier. “Someone actually has to make a decision to do it, and they need to have the confidence and the authority to do it and to do it quickly. There has to be some level of decentralized decision making in terms of doing things, you know, quickly and rapidly and whatnot.” 

He recounted another notable incident without the use of Alert Ready in British Columbia. 

“There was an off-shore earthquake off the coast of British Columbia,” he said. “There was concern that it would create some sort of tsunami effect and it took 45 minutes for the British Columbia Emergency Measures Organization to issue a warning.” 

The earthquake happened off Vancouver Island in January 2018. Emergency Management B.C., according to reporting from CBC, used text messages, first responders, sirens and door-knocking to warn people to go to higher ground. 

“There was no tsunami, though, but what was particularly revealing about it was that Washington state had issued a release in six minutes, so they didn’t really have a get-out-jail-free card, because the obvious question was, why could Washington state do it in six minutes?”

Another example 

There is one other significantly notable instance of the Alert Ready system not being used in an active shooter situation, leading to ultimately fatal consequences.  

In April 2020, a gunman killed 22 people in several Nova Scotia communities before being shot and killed by police in Enfield. He was driving a mock RCMP cruiser and dressed as an RCMP officer. 

The families of several victims said in media interviews and a class-action lawsuit that the Alert Ready system could have saved lives. 

In Nova Scotia, the RCMP do not have authority or jurisdiction to issue emergency alerts. All requests must go through the province’s Emergency Management Office. 

Testimony during a public inquiry into the massacre revealed issuing one “didn’t cross their minds.” The RCMP also relied on X (formerly Twitter) as its main form of communication. 

Back in the Saint Andrews area, a significant amount of personnel fought the forest fire for roughly eight days. The fire was considered under control on June 5 but was still being patrolled about a month later. 

“We didn’t know how bad this fire was going to get,” Henderson said. “There was a point in the evening where it was so dark that they had to back off and almost just be responsive in case someone called that it was close to their house.” 

Crews from the Department of Natural Resources and Energy Development also battled the blaze, working to save homes and people. Video footage shows fire personnel working on hot spots, washing down the black earth that was left behind. 

Henderson said he has thought a lot about the “what ifs” in the months following the fire.

He said one couple told him after they thought they heard “something” at the door but weren’t sure and slept in their house that night – unaware of the risk surrounding their home. 

“So, an emergency alert probably would have been good if they had a way to get that through to them,” Henderson said.

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