Right in the centre - Things seem to be going backwards

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Published on Monday, August 13, 2018

By Ken Waddell

Neepawa Banner & Press

The tragic news out of Alonsa on Aug. 3 was shock wave to everyone. A tornado snuck into the community and when it blew itself out somewhere near the western shore of Lake Manitoba, it left a path of death and destruction. One older man died, two injuries were reported. The physical damage to property was mind-boggling. Houses were destroyed or damaged, trees were torn apart, campers and vehicles destroyed. 

Tornadoes don’t happen often in Manitoba but they certainly do. A few years ago, Elie was badly hit and there have been many more. I can remember one when I was growing up near Holland, Manitoba.

The particularly disturbing part about the Alonsa tornado was that in spite of cell service allegedly having been upgraded, few got the warning. Worse yet, Alonsa had pretty good cell service until the upgrade was done. Now, cell service is reported to be much worse. Clearly, something had gone wrong.

Much has been made of getting the whole country on an alert system, be it by cell, landline, television or radio. Alonsa’s storm alert was not the first such failure and probably won’t be the last. Some months ago, a nation-wide practice alert was staged. Apparently, half the people of Canada didn’t get the notice. One is left to wonder, what on earth is going on? The federal government can’t get their payroll system to work. The 911 emergency system seems to break down from time to time. I suspect that paralyzing bureaucracy is part of the problem.

To illustrate the problem, let me relate the results of a relatively simple 911 call from a few years back. My wife and I were just coming off the Minnedosa Golf Course. Darkness was falling and the clubhouse was closed for the night. The remaining staff had just gone out on the course to check something. Out in the parking lot was flat deck trailer, with two recently purchased used grass mowers. One was smoldering and soon burst into flames. Naturally, I called 911 and asked that the Minnedosa Fire Department be dispatched to the golf course. Frustratingly enough, that was not as simple as one might assume. The operator wanted to know the civic address which, of course, I didn’t know. No amount of explaining that I couldn’t tell the address seemed to appease the process. The operator was not to be deterred. In exasperation, I suggested that she simply call the Minnedosa Fire Department and ask them to proceed to the local golf course. I suggested to the operator that I was pretty sure that somebody in the department would know where the golf course was located. Somebody somewhere must have contacted the department as, finally, in the distance, I could hear the fire truck’s sirens. I told the operator not to bother and I hung up.

I suspect that insistence on bureaucratic standards in place of common sense leads to a lot of foul-ups, not the least of which is the recent cell phone service failure and a lack of a storm alert at Alonsa. It will be interesting to note how fast these two separate, but related, failures are remedied.

No amount of cell service or warnings would have saved the trees, the homes, the camper trailers or the out-buildings, but one man’s life might have been saved. Except for some very fast action by people to save themselves and others, many more lives might have been lost.

There needs to be some answers about what happened, or more precisely, what didn’t happen, Friday at Alonsa, on that muggy summer night. The Association of Manitoba Municipalities is saying senior governments have to step up to provide capital to upgrade cell service. How much longer does rural Manitoba have to wait to get decent coverage? Why the delay? Why the degradation in service rather than an improvement? Perhaps a public inquiry would be in order.