The Decibel - Dispatch calls reveal chaos of deadly floods in Nova Scotia

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

In the early hours of July 22, chaos was erupting in Nova Scotia. Rain was pouring down, causing intense flooding. People were panicked about whether to stay or leave their homes. Emergency crews were overwhelmed. In the end, four people died in the floods.A series of radio calls made between one volunteer fire department and the emergency dispatch provide a glimpse into when and how things unfolded that night. They also raise questions as to why it took officials almost two hours to issue an emergency alert with instructions to shelter in place.Lindsay Jones is the Globe’s Atlantic Canada reporter, based in Halifax. She has gone from covering wildfires to floods and is on the show to go through what we’ve learned in the weeks since the fatal flooding.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

This is one of the emergency dispatchers in Nova Scotia in the early hours of July 22nd, as rains and winds pummeled the province. We haven't made it to that address. We've got multiple roads that are flooding really bad here. We're currently at 178 Ellers House Road, checking on someone that's yard is a river. We'll let you know once we're clear here. Yeah, Roger. Everyone, please use extreme caution.

These are flood conditions like we've never seen before. The calls paint a real-time picture of how things went from bad to worse really quickly, like this rescue of a person stuck in their flooded house. Yeah, break, break, break. Meeting, meeting, meeting. Guys, get stuck in their flooded house. Luckily, this firefighter was able to be rescued after being swept up in the floodwaters. We just, we lost one of our people. We got them back. We just brought one person in. We got multiple other rescues to do at this time. We need you guys to get our ASAP. We got one person ashore, but we gotta get him up over at Bank with the Stokes basket. But not everyone was saved, including one adult, a teenager, and two children. Brooklyn, command copy to set. Go ahead.

For the people trapped in the vehicle on Highway 14, I guess they are now separated. There's a child missing. Today, Lindsay Jones is on the show. She's the Globe's reporter based in Nova Scotia. She's been covering the floods and the province's response to them, including why people weren't alerted to the dangers until hours after the disaster began. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Lindsay, thanks so much for being here today. Thanks for having me.

So, Lindsay, we just heard some dramatic tape of the radio calls between emergency dispatchers and firefighters in the area of West Hance. And one of the calls they got was for children who got separated from their family in the flooding. I'm just wondering, what do we know about what happened there? Well, we know there were two families that escaped from their home around 2.30 a.m. In the vehicles were the Harnish family and Chris Sisko and his son Colton. The Harnish family, there was a mom and a dad, a six-year-old girl named Natalie, and her younger special needs brother, who was two, named Christian. And what happened? Do we know what happened to these families? So as soon as they turned out the end of their driveway onto Highway 14 in Brooklyn. Flood water swept their vehicle away. The families tried to save all of the children.

Chris Sisko became separated from his son Colton and Nick Harnish and his wife. They were able to save Christian, but their daughter Natalie disappeared. Oh my goodness. Can't imagine. Do we know anything about these kids? Like how, what were they like? From what I heard about Natalie, she loved the color purple. She and Colton were buddies. They were, they were really good friends and looking forward to spending that time together that weekend. I heard that she loved to help take care of her little brother, Christian,

who had a feeding tube. And she was just a really sweet, super outgoing, cartwheeling little girl. And what about Colton? Well, Colton loved his pigs. His family had a farm and he enjoyed helping his father with the tractors in the yard. He loved to snuggle with his mom and eat popcorn and wear Spider-Man pajamas and play with his collection of Spider-Man toys. Colton's family is devastated by his loss. Yeah. I mean, devastating losses for these families. And I know that these weren't the only people who died that day. Yeah.

So there was another vehicle traveling on Highway 14 around the same time, and that vehicle was swept away. And there were three adults in that SUV, along with 14-year-old Terry Lynn Keddie. She was a cancer survivor who'd recently been given a clean bill of health after undergoing chemotherapy. She really wanted to start babysitting. And she was just, from everything I heard about her, she was this bright light who was so positive. So she passed away. And also, Nick Holland, who was a musician in a heavy metal band, he passed away as well. And Colton and Natalie, were they ever found? Yes, every person that went missing was found. One child was found 25 kilometers away from where search crews were looking in Brooklyn in West Hance. And the other child was found in the, you know, the main search area where the vehicles submerged. I mean, when we talk about 25 kilometers, that's, you know, it just really shows the power and the force of the water there.

Yes. And Terry Lynn Keddie was also found in Advocate Harbor, which was about 100 kilometers away. There's this very strong push and pull of the tides every day. And so that is how police believe the children were taken that large of a distance. Nova Scotia got a lot of rain that day. It was about three months worth of rain in just a day. But can you help me understand why was the flooding so intense in this particular area of the province? So this area appears to be on a flood plain. And it also got, you know, the maximum amount of rainfall of anywhere. Another thing about this region is it's influenced by the Bay of Fundy, which has the highest tides in the

world. Twice a day, the tides roll in, they flood and a lot of the rivers and tributaries in the area, it's multiple stories of water come in and out daily. What about the wildfires? Because there were wildfires earlier in June. So did that have anything to do with why this particular area saw the flooding it did? So from the climate experts that I talked to, my understanding is that this extreme weather is an effect of climate change. To experience such a long period of dry, hot weather, you know, we were bound to get the other side of that, which was heavy rain that finally fell. And in that one particular part of the province in

West Hance, it was catastrophic. Oh, yeah. And so this rain and flooding, it happened kind of in the dark of the early hours of July 22nd. What do we know about what emergency officials were doing at that time? Firefighters were overwhelmed with the response. I could hear them on the dispatch saying, we cannot come help people unless there is a risk of loss of life. If people are safe in their homes, please instruct them to shelter in place at this time. And I don't want any personnel put at risk for rescuing pets at this time.

We're only going to deal with human lives at this time, please. It seemed like they did not want any other vehicles on the road because they were already overwhelmed with trying to save and rescue a number of other people that were out there. We could hear emergency responders seeing cars that were trapped in floodwaters. One man was in a tree. Got another 911 call for 6119 Highway 1 in Ellersdorf. Your caller's vehicle was submerged in water. He's now hanging in a tree. 6-1-1-9, Highway 1. He said he can see trucks. Throughout the rest of the province, there was major infrastructure damage across dozens of roads and bridges, which still are not repaired.

This was unlike anything people had ever seen in Nova Scotia. So, Lindsay, I'm just wondering, like, at any point, were these first responders trying to communicate this level of danger to the public? Yeah. So starting at 1.12 a.m., an official with the Brooklyn Volunteer Fire Department asked 911 dispatch for an emergency alert. We need an emergency alert put out for West Hance area for people to shelter in place at this time. We need people to stay off the roads. We have major flooding and damage to infrastructure. So if you are able to have RCMP contact us,

if they're able to just put that emergency alert out, that would be very much appreciated. That message took an hour and 56 minutes, I believe, nearly two hours to finally get out. Wow, that's a long time. So when the fire department did ask for an alert, what were they told? A call for an emergency alert can only come from the municipality. So there was a bit of a miscommunication there about who held that responsibility. The 911 dispatcher calls the RCMP. The RCMP advises, you know, we don't have the authority to

call the emergency alert for a flood, but will pass it on to the province, which does. So they pass it on to the province. Then the province contacts the municipality and that person isn't available. That person is off grid. All of this took time to find the right person to authorize the emergency alert in the municipality to craft the emergency alert.

The alert finally went out at 3.06 a.m. And so in listening to the dispatch, you could hear the repetitive pleading calls. Yeah, Roger. Valiant, I need that emergency message put out by RCMP now. I need that out now. We need people to stay in their homes. Yep, copy. We're trying, but it's a bit of a process on how it gets into. So we are trying. It's really harrowing to hear that now in light of the fact that within that span of time,

between 1-12 and 3-06 when the alert went went out that people were swept off the road and died. We'll be right back. Okay, so Lindsay, just to recap how this crisis unfolded in this region of the province. We have this volunteer firefighter team pleading for an alert to get people to shelter at home. It takes about two hours for this to happen. And this is in part because of confusion around how these alerts are issued. This makes me think about the Port-au-Pic massacre in 2020, where 22 people were killed. And in that time, the public also didn't get alerts about the active shooter immediately.

I'm just wondering, didn't the province receive recommendations on how to fix things after that? So after that failure to send out an emergency alert during the mass shooting, the province authorized the police to send out emergency alerts themselves. Right. And that was just for criminal matters. So in the case of a natural disaster like the flooding, why did it take two hours to send an alert? The province maintains they acted as quick as they could once they went through their protocol, which involved having the municipal official make the request. Also, you know, one thing that the municipality is looking into as well is did the lack of cell phone service

in the area impact the ability to communicate amongst people who needed to authorize that alert? I mean, that's it. That's another thing. We don't know the answer to that yet. So it does show the need for more training. people need to understand how to, you know, what the chain of command is in an emergency situation and what to do. And, you know, one thing that I raised with the Premier of Nova Scotia was around the decentralization of emergency alerts. And so this would allow more people on the ground to issue a public alert so it doesn't have to go through all of these circuitous chain of command that led to these delays. So coming back to the cell phone service issue, which we kind of talked about earlier, how have officials responded to criticisms that reception is risking lives there. We heard from the mayor of West Hance that there were multiple people that didn't receive the emergency alert due to poor cellular service or no cellular service.

You know, this is not the middle of nowhere. This is five minutes off a 100 series highway in Nova Scotia near, you know, a major town where many people commute into the city of Halifax, and they don't have reliable service in that town. So this is something that Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland addressed after the floods. She said that it needs to change. She wants to see urgent action. The CRTC, the telecommunications regulator in Canada, and telecommunications companies themselves all have a responsibility to fix this problem. And can you just explain like the CRTC, how are they involved? Are they a part of basically making these changes? So they're responsible for the public alert system for

Alert Ready, which is like the national public alerting system. And they're the ones who are responsible for enforcing regulations that require cell providers and radio and TV broadcasters, which can also send out public alerts to distribute the emergency alerts. And Lindsay, I know you've also talked to Colton Sisko's family. Do they feel as if it would have made a difference if they had gotten an alert before they fled? Colton's father has said that he doesn't believe it would have made a difference, but he'll never know. It's a what if type of situation. And in speaking with his grandfather, Calvin Leggett, he said that he doesn't believe it would have made a difference. But he's advocating for changes to remove this bottleneck in sending out emergency alerts so that no other family has to go through what theirs did. I think it's very hard to say for certain, you know, what would have happened. I mean, this family needed to flee their home.

Water was apparently coming up five feet right outside the door. No one had warned them to evacuate or to stay in place. They didn't know what to do. It's hard to say. There were so many hazards in that situation. But had the emergency alert come sooner and people had this information in their hands, which they needed in an emergency to protect them to make the right decisions for their safety. They didn't get that. Yeah. Wow. Okay. I want to

turn to Nova Scotia's flood response in general, broadly speaking, like how prepared was the province to deal with this kind of disaster? So there was a report card that came out in 2020 from the Intact Center on Climate Adaption at the University of Waterloo. I spoke with the author of that report, and he told me Nova Scotia had well-documented evidence regarding its substantial lack of preparedness for flood risk, and the province did not act sufficiently to correct these deficiencies prior to the floods. So the one area that we did do okay and was emergency preparedness. The author of the report said to me that this meant the burden landed on emergency first responders, which I think we hear firsthand in those dispatches from 911.

So what does the provincial government say about this? The provincial government provided me with a joint statement from a couple of different departments saying that it has a municipal floodline mapping program and it's creating updated hazard maps for all watersheds to help inform municipalities of flood risks. So they say this will give municipalities more information so that they can help improve their preparedness and response plans for potential flood events. So, you know, the of the issues that comes up is, you know, this close sort of political nature of it makes it more difficult to make those decisions and that other provinces in Atlantic Canada, they're one step politically removed. And New Brunswick, for instance, does have a provincial

portal where you can go on there and look and see anywhere in the province that is on a floodplain and its history of flooding. Well, it seems like there's still a lot of steps in the process. You know, it seems to be it needs to be streamlined there. And, you know, it makes me think that hurricane season is coming up quickly for the province. You know, the peak is usually in September. I'm just wondering, is there anything that Nova Scotia can do immediately, like right now, to be prepared for that? The province suggested to me that individuals can prepare by sealing their basement doors and

windows, installing a sump pump is really important, checking insurance coverage, and also avoiding building new homes on floodplains, which, you know, you think would be fairly instinctual for most people. But if you don't have those maps available to you and they're not, then how do you know? Yeah. So those are things individuals can do. The province says it will be hiring a flood coordinator and a stormwater engineer to implement flood prevention and climate change adoption measures. So there is movement underway to improve the response to flood risk here in Nova Scotia. Lindsay, just to end, it's been over two weeks since these floods, roads and bridges were destroyed, over 500 people were displaced. I just wonder how are things for people in the province

today? Well, people are still picking up the pieces in the most impacted parts of the province. There are people who will never be going back to their homes. All of the roads are still not open yet. Some of the bridges are destroyed and still not reopened, but there's detours. Things are flowing as usual here. But certainly no one is going to forget this. And the loss of four people was devastating. Lindsay, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Nagui Nia is our summer producer. Our producers are Madeline White and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer. And Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.