For the communities that we have been dealing with, emergency plans really vary. There are all-hazards plans. There are hazard-specific plans. We've been working with about 150 of the communities. A lot of them are grouped together because of geography. As an example, in the Lower Nicola, there are probably five or six communities that are really close together. It's a two-minute drive between the communities.
When it comes to the north, though, there are few communities that have a fulsome plan. If they have a plan, they rarely have the capacity to have a full-time emergency coordinator to be able to implement said plan.
With that being said, we have been working, as FNESS, with our emergency department—or our mitigation department, as we're labelling it—to try to coordinate with those communities that don't have a plan and supply them with one. It's been a little difficult, at this point, because some of them are still dealing with COVID, for example. They haven't opened up their community for us to come in. We have many other supports that we're also trying to provide to them by way of wildfire training on mitigation, planning and things like that, as well as for structure fires.
When it comes to the communities that have a plan, there are probably about 15 to 20, off the top of my head, that have a full-time emergency coordinator position to go along with these plans. A lot of times, we're finding that, even if they have a plan, it's sitting in a binder in somebody's desk or has been sitting on a bookshelf for five or six years and rarely gets opened up.
We're trying to communicate with these communities and bring them an emergency specialist or an emergency officer. We've increased our capacity to be able to do this by hiring about four or five extra officers to go to these communities and work with them. We've even built EOC kits for those communities that don't have a plan in place. We have an all-hazards, super-generic plan to at least get them in the right direction for what they should be thinking about, but there's so much work that still needs to be done.