The City of Grande Prairie says its portion of the wildfire emergency management bill cost a shade over $1.3 million dollars.
On top of the financial implications, 100 city staff clocked 8159 hours of work during the event as part of the Grande Prairie Regional Emergency Partnership.
Councillor Chris Thiessen says staff and residents should be proud, as the city to this point had only trained to welcome as many as 350 evacuees, and that number was nearly tripled.
“Hopefully this never happens again, but if ever we have to take in another 1000 evacuees we will be more than prepared and will have learned our lessons from this point forward.”
Thiessen says all evacuees were back to in their homes on the weekend of June 23rd. He adds the power to prevent major fires like this rests with every individual, and he hopes people across the region will be more cognizant of fire risks going forward.
“We all have our responsibility to be mindful of what we are doing and how we are taking our fires and putting them out. If we’re smoking, make sure those butts are out and not throwing them out the window as we drive down the highway. We are seeing more and more of these events and we want to be as preventative of possible.”
As part of its GPREP responsibilities, Grande Prairie also had boots on the ground in High Level with members of the incident management team, as well as two trucks used by fire officials on the ground.