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The Water Supply Association of B.C.
Ninth Annual General Meeting & Conference
October 30, 2003
Address by the Auditor General of British Columbia
Wayne Strelioff, CA
Good morning and thank you for the warm introduction.
Also, thank you for this opportunity to speak to you about our 2001 audit report and subsequent follow-up on how well interface fire risks are managed in the province. I would also like to take this opportunity to update you on our plans to carry out a second audit regarding government's progress on protecting drinking water sources. After my comments, I will try my best to answer any questions you may have.
I am sure this conference offers all of you a wonderful opportunity to discuss the issues that affect BC’s water suppliers and their customers. Isn’t it interesting how something has to go wrong such as this summer’s interface fires or deadly water contamination at Walkerton several years ago for these issues to receive greater priority.
Before I deal with our reports, I want to tell you a little about the Office of the Auditor General and me.
I became the Auditor General of British Columbia over 3 years ago.
Prior to that, I was the Provincial Auditor of Saskatchewan
for nearly ten years. I am a chartered accountant.
As the Auditor General, I am an officer of the Legislative Assembly. My reports—which
are public—are automatically referred to the Public Accounts Committee.
This eleven person Committee of legislators is chaired by a member of the opposition and has the responsibility to deal with my reports in meetings open to the public.
In general, the role of an Auditor General is to help all legislators and, thus, all citizens, hold the government accountable for its use of public resources and for its management of the considerable responsibilities entrusted to government.
I have a relatively small Office of about 90 people with a wide range of professional credentials and experience. We have access to all parts of government, to all types of information, and we decide what to examine and when, and what to report. And, our reports our public.
We have three main lines of business:
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Our recent risk work focused on subject matters such as:
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In our initial planning of this audit, we looked at the broad topic of forest fire suppression but after several interviews with key stakeholders, we quickly decided that managing interface fire risks warranted our attention.
The purpose of our audit was to assess the degree to which governments in British Columbia are prepared for major interface fires.
Following consultations with numerous stakeholders, we focused on 4 questions.
Audit Evidence and Approach
As you would expect, our work and reports are evidenced based.
We obtain evidence from three main sources: interviews, surveys and document reviews.
Our interviews focused on staff in the Ministry of Forests, Office of the Fire Commissioner, Provincial Emergency Program and local governments throughout the province including your lunchtime speaker Kelowna’s Fire Chief Mr. Jerry Zimmerman.
We surveyed all chief administrative officers, fire chiefs, development/planning directors, and emergency coordinators to obtain their assessments of interface fire risks and how well risks are being managed.
We also collected and analyzed more than 200 documents from a variety of jurisdictions containing research results and other information about the management of interface fire risks.
Our project team included several experienced professionals within my Office and a risk management expert with interface fire experience.
We also established an external advisory committee with 3 private citizens. One had extensive experience as a local government official, one is a former fire chief; and one is a past leader of a provincial fire protection agency.
Together, our advisory group helped to ensure that our audit approach, findings and conclusions were reasonable. We establish advisory groups for most of our risk audits.
We concluded that governments in British Columbia have much to do to be well-prepared for major interface fires.
In reaching our conclusion, we focused our work on the four questions I stated earlier.
The first question is whether the roles and responsibilities of provincial agencies and local governments are clearly spelled out.
Clarity is needed to ensure that there are no gaps in managing risks.
We found that roles and responsibilities are relatively clear about responding to an interface fire but less clear about who is responsible for prevention, preparedness and recovery planning.
In addition, clarity of roles and responsibilities for managing fire risks on first Nations lands is particularly weak.
We think a lack of clearly defined roles and responsibilities leads to other weaknesses we found and to the limited attention given to interface fire risks by both levels of government.
Our second question focused on what is being done to prevent interface fires and to limit their effects when they do occur.
All of us know that preventing problems is a whole lot easier and less costly than dealing with them once they occur.
Prevention involves ensuring local governments and residents are aware of the risks of wildfires and how to take actions to reduce those risks.
We found that provincial agencies, for example, the Protection Branch in the Ministry of Forests, work hard each year to promote prevention work in communities.
Our evidence, however, suggests that community awareness levels and efforts to reduce risks are still not good.
For example, many communities do not do risk assessments and many make limited use of techniques available to control risks such as requiring fire resistant materials be used in new construction.
Our third question focused on whether communities are prepared to respond to and recover from interface fires.
Preparation means taking action ahead of time to ensure that all those involved are adequately prepared to react effectively when a fire emergency takes place.
We found that many aspects of response planning are done well in the province. No doubt, this has helped limit the number of major interface fires.
For example, our wild land fire service is well trained and equipped and many communities have excellent structural firefighting and emergency response services.
Also, regional organizations such as the Thompson Okanagan Interagency Committee and the Kootenay Interface Steering Team do excellent work to help deal with interface fire risks.
But, despite many strengths, we think there is much room for improvement.
We think a key priority should be to improve the state of local emergency planning.
Many jurisdictions lack emergency plans, and even
when plans exist the plans don’t deal adequately with interface fires
or recovery.
Some jurisdictions test their ability to respond to a significant fire, but
many do not.
We found that both local firefighters and emergency responders know they need to improve their training and equipment, and both groups believe their communities are poorly prepared to deal with major evacuations.
We also found that much needs to be done to find ways to reduce risks in small communities that do not have structural fire services or only have small but valuable groups of volunteers.
Our fourth and final question focused on the importance of gathering sound information about the interface fires that take place in BC.
We found that the term ‘interface fire’ is not defined in a consistent manner. As a result, the information being gathered is likely to be unreliable.
In addition, the statistics collected by the Protection Branch and by the Fire Commissioner are never combined to provide a complete Provincial picture.
With incomplete and unreliable information, raising awareness and encouraging focused attention is even more difficult a task.
In our public report to the Legislative Assembly, we made 37 recommendations - we intend to follow up on each one.
One key recommendation is that the provincial government establish an Interface Fire Committee with representatives from the Provincial Emergency Program, the Ministry of Forests, and the Office of the Fire Commissioner.
This coordinating group is needed in order to clarify roles and responsibilities and to foster a province wide approach.
Eight of our recommendations are directed at this Interface Fire group.
We directed over 20 recommendations at the Provincial Emergency Program which is the provincial emergency coordinating agency and leader in emergency management.
We think the Ministry of Forests Protection Branch has played a key role in managing interface fire risks. In our public report, we commend the people in this Branch for their significant efforts.
We did, however, direct five recommendations to the attention of the Protection Branch.
For example, we think that the Branch’s response priorities should be set out in legislation because when firefighters focus on protecting human life and property, they can be criticized for not protecting forests.
Other jurisdictions, such as Alberta and Oregon, plan to set out priorities in legislation—we think BC should do the same.
We also note the need to complete hazard mapping, to resolve community concerns about working arrangements between the Protection Branch and local fire departments, and to improve communication capabilities among response personnel during fire emergencies.
With a small staff, the Office of the Fire Commissioner is to enforce fire safety laws, investigate fires, inform the public about fire safety, and certify firefighters.
The Commissioner also responds to major emergencies.
In our report, we ask this Office:
Now, has anything happened since we released our report in the summer of 2001—in addition, of course, to the ongoing build up of combustible material close to where people live and work?
All of our reports go to the Public Accounts Committee which—as I mentioned earlier—is made up of eleven MLAs and is chaired by a member of the opposition.
In December 2001, this Committee reviewed our report and asked questions of officials from the Forest Protection Branch, Provincial Emergency Program and the Office of the Fire Commissioner.
After a lengthy and sometimes intense discussion—because some members have had real life experiences with interface fires in their districts—the Committee endorsed all of our recommendations.
The Committee also urged the three provincial agencies to form the Interface Fire group we had suggested and to report back on when our recommendations would be implemented.
In January 2002, the beginnings of this group met to make progress.
When we issue reports, we follow up on each of our recommendations and report back to the Public Accounts Committee on progress. We did this in November of 2002.
While progress is often not as fast as I’d like, in almost all cases positive actions occur within government and elsewhere. In this case we found that 15 of the 37 recommendations had been fully implemented.
The newly established interface fire committee had clarified roles and responsibilities related to managing interface fire risks.
The Provincial Emergency Program was responsible for fully implementing 14 more recommendations including:
At the time, we were told that further work on the remaining recommendations—20 that had been partially implemented and 2 with no action—would depend on the availability of staff and resources, both of which were being reduced as a result of a core review process that took place all across government.
This follow-up report was not reviewed by the Public Accounts Committee prior to this year’s fire season.
We have recently been scheduled to review this report with the Public Accounts Committee in November 2003. Since it has been over a year since we issued the first follow up, we asked the ministry responsible for the Provincial Emergency Program to coordinate an updated response. My staff is in the process of reviewing that response.
I’m sure you heard the Premier’s announcement at the beginning of this month that BC has appointed Mr. Gary Filmon from Manitoba to head a review of the province’s response to the summer wildfire crisis. My staff met earlier this week with Mr. Filmon to discuss our interface fire audit. His review is to be completed by February 15 so recommendations can be implemented before the 2004 fire season.
I guess we can safely say that the issue of managing interface fire risk has risen substantially as a result of the catastrophic fires that took place this summer. I hope this window of opportunity provides fertile ground for the further implementation of my recommendations and those of Mr. Filmon to reduce interface fire risks.
I would now like to move on to a quick summary of my work on Protecting Drinking Water Sources.
As some of you may be aware, in March 1999 Mr. George Morfitt, my predecessor, issued an audit report on whether British Columbia is getting good value from an important resource—drinking water sources.
We concluded that the Province was not adequately protecting drinking water sources from human-related impacts and that the related future cost impacts would affect not only the Province but also municipal and regional governments as well as citizens in general.
We made 26 recommendations regarding:
At the time of our first follow-up in October
2000 only 3 of these recommendations had been fully implemented.
We carried out a second follow up in October 2002. As part of that review we
received a letter from the Minister of Health Services updating us on the government’s
action plan for drinking water protection in BC.
His letter told us that on June 19, 2002 the government announced an action plan for drinking water protection that gave consideration to the recommendations on our audit report and 2 other reports prepared subsequent to our audit:
These documents described substantial changes
to government policy regarding the protection of drinking water sources.
As a result we did not perform our normal follow-up procedures.
Instead, we intend to carry out a new audit examining the progress made in protecting drinking water sources since our last examination. We will focus on water-source protection in the same 8 communities that we studied in our original audit:
Kelowna |
Fort St. John |
Williams Lake |
Abbotsford |
Cranbrook |
Prince George |
Prince Rupert |
Nanaimo |
As water purveyors supplying any of these communities we will be asking for your comments and advice as we proceed with this work. I’m sure topics discussed here today such as the sale of crown leases on drinking water reservoirs will be included in our community case studies. We are planning to carry out this new audit in 2004.
Now, I will try my best to answer any questions you have at this time.
Wrap Up
I realize that you face significant challenges in managing water supplies and must do so in an era of changing regulation and what seems like never ending decreasing publicly available financial resources.
As I’ve said to other groups I’ve addressed, all of us need to work together to make the best use of those financial resources.
A key purpose of my work is to encourage awareness within our community of provincially elected officials. And, I plan to continue doing this. I know you will do your part and I wish you all of the best.
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