British Columbia is very sparse, with very different geographic tendencies. When we talk about breaking down our offices, as I mentioned, we have two main offices, and they are primarily in southern B.C. and strategically placed because of those hazards that are typically there. When it comes to the floods and the fires that occur throughout the province, in the past when we tried to get resources from, say, Vancouver, because that's where we keep our flood equipment—storage issues are always a big issue right now—trying to get them to the north past those areas when the Okanagan is flooding is difficult.
Last year was a perfect example this past November, when the entire south was cut off, the entire metro Vancouver area. All of our resources in North Vancouver could not get anywhere beyond that, and the equipment that we have in Kamloops is more geared towards wildfires, so it didn't have the flood response equipment necessary to be able to support those communities. That's one of the reasons why we are trying to work towards having something similar to what the regional districts have for their regions or what the EMBC breaks out for regions, and also what B.C. Wildfire has. They all have it broken down very similarly: the northwest, the northeast, the Cariboo central interior, the south, metro Vancouver and Vancouver Island.
This plan allows us to coordinate our personnel and our equipment to be able to respond to any community. Let's say there are more fires in the Kamloops area but north of Kamloops, and that there are northern communities on the other side that we can't get to. We can bring resources down from the Prince George area, as an example, and support those communities, or vice versa. It's about having that ability and that capacity to be able to respond from multiple angles or pull in multiple resources. B.C. Wildfire uses this model as well. If there are a lot of fires going on in Kamloops, they pull their resources from the Skeena district, where I live, and from the central interior and Bulkley Valley interior, to the south, leaving minimal resources up there because there's nothing going on, so that they can all move to where the hazards really are that are impacting communities.
That's basically what we're trying to do—to mimic what successful regional offices have already established.