On the night floodwaters swept through his Nova Scotia county, taking lives and tearing out bridges, Doug Pynch says he had trouble believing an emergency alert that flashed across his phone.
It called for residents to evacuate to a civic centre in Newport, N.S., a community that was already seeing water accumulating in low-lying areas. The retired deputy fire chief said he soon found himself having to transport people in his large truck, as cars couldn't cross an intersection where water was pooling.
The mayor of the Municipality of West Hants has said many residents reported they didn't receive any emergency alert at all because of the area's spotty cellular service. "We were told we were getting 40 millimetres of water, but I think we topped out at over 300 millimetres. If you don't have a forecast you can rely on, you have to take safe steps to keep people safe," he told the minister.
"There's a sense of complacency .... We must act with urgency to prepare for climate change and extreme weather risks that are only going to get more challenging," he said in a telephone interview on Friday. Nova Scotia needs "a system in place to ensure there's adequate knowledge to issue adequate flood alerts, accurately and in a manner that's well-timed and in a manner that will allow people to put themselves out of harm's way," he said.Jim Prime, a forecaster for Environment Canada, said in an interview that at about 11 p.m.
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