Prince George, B.C. – ‘Home for the holidays’ – the phrase has taken on a whole new meaning to the evacuees of the Victoria Towers apartment building fire and those who have been working with them to find accomodations.

A fire broke out in the 12-storey building in the early morning hours of November 3rd, forcing the evacuation of more than 90 people.  It will be anywhere from one to three months before they can return to their suites. Under the Provincial Emergency Program, the City’s Evacuation Support Program assisted the evacuees with the basic necessities – food, accomodation, clothing and incidentals – for an extended one-month period to December 5th.

ESP Deputy Director, Brad Beckett, says over the course of the month, the City worked with a number of agencies – the Red Cross, BC Housing, the Ministry of Social Development, Prince George Native Friendship Centre, Salvation Army and others – to find housing arrangements for the displaced residents.

"Our goal was to try and find places for these folks to move into – other than hotels, more long-term housing options – before Christmas," says Beckett. "Certainly in the winter we have our challenges, and the other challenge is to find affordable housing for that many people all at once."

But the goal has been accomplished. "The words exchanged during the inter-agency phone calls were ‘phenomenal’ and ‘absolutely amazing’," he adds. "The community really, really came together and we have some amazing people in a variety of different agencies that just really care about what they do and they really want to help people out."

The City began working on a new emergency assistance plan in the aftermath of the 2007 icejam. Since then there have been some smaller scale incidents – the Columbus Hotel fire and some spring flooding evacuations – but Beckett says this was the largest ‘roll out’ of the Evacuation Support Program.

"Every emergency situation is always a little bit different. We were dealing with a large number of people, it was kind of a marginalized population and there were a whole host of different issues -like medicines, medical requirements and things like that – that we hadn’t had a lot of experience with," says the ESP Deputy Director. "We ended up getting huge support from Northern Health in terms of psycho-social assistance and helping with meds and all kinds of things like that."

Reid’s Pharmacy worked with Northern Health to set up a pharmacy right in the evacuation reception centre to assist the displaced residents with their medication needs.

"(It was) just a phenomenal community effort, we’ve learned a lot, we’ve developed some new partners from this that we’ll be adding to our community inventory list," says Beckett.

"Every one of these (events) is a learning experience – you know your systems are good, but they’re not perfect. So once we have our debrief, we’ll finetune things and we’ll be that much better the next time."