That's a great question.
One of the pillars we have identified as FNESS is recovery itself. It's its own pillar. We have identified an emergency management specialist—he was our prior emergency manager—and we've actually tasked him to the recovery specialist branch of our society to try to figure out the best way to handle recovery in first nations communities. When it comes to what the federal government can do to support that, I think there are three things.
Funding for recovery specialists is not something that you can go to university and get trained for. Most of the time, it's a boots-on-the-ground type of thing. You're meeting with the communities, figuring out what they need to do and finding ways to get those things done. Using Lytton as an example, where the fire came through from CN Rail, we're trying to figure out what we can do for the community members who are still displaced, and we are trying to find a way to get them home, a way to get them out of whatever situation they're in. They've been moved four or five times now since this event occurred because of each of the timelines of the response agencies, whether it was EMBC, the Red Cross or the community administrations themselves.
Another part that I think we might be able to support is bringing in other specialists, whether they're from outside of the province or from other agencies that do work like this. I don't recall a lot at this particular time that specialize in recovery, but there is a lot of coordination that needs to occur between construction companies, for example, or builders and electricians and things like that, or ground stability specialists and so on. The list goes on forever, depending on the emergency.
The last thing we discussed in our board meeting with FNESS is trying to have that structure to be able to respond to multiple areas at the same time. Right now, we have only two main offices, one in North Vancouver and one in Kamloops. What we are trying to do is establish offices or at least response offices regionally throughout the province, and there have been discussions of expanding even beyond that.
When it comes to coordination of resources, regardless of which pillar we're in, whether it's mitigation preparedness or recovery and so on, the idea is to minimize the amount of time between when we get the call that they have an incident to where we transition from mitigating the incident to starting to plan for recovery. The sooner that takes place, the better the chances we have of reducing the amount of time that families are displaced from their homes.