We're getting into two very different focuses here. We have emergency response, and we have emergency management. In a lot of areas, the fire chief is both the emergency management coordinator and the fire chief.
In the event that the incident takes place, the emergency response will immediately go. That level of response is determined by council, whether or not they are in haz-mat operations, technical or even just in awareness. Awareness is that they can actually identify what's on fire, what's involved and then call for help. That's about all they can do, and then they can do evacuations and the like.
Should that then become something that is beginning to impact large numbers of people, as you know, the mayor might declare an emergency. An emergency operations centre will be declared, and that is when you get the industry partners. You get all the community partners, like the director of the PUC, police, EMS, fire and all the municipal departments. Even some of the charities are then around that table, trying to manage the incident and support the operations that are going ahead.
That is immense, and speaking as somebody who has had three ongoing emergencies simultaneously, that basically stops your municipality, and you're all working just to deal with an emergency. It's incredibly time-consuming. It's incredibly impactful on all the members of staff, not to mention the actual trauma that it brings to the community.
To answer your question, it very much depends on what it is we're dealing with.
I will say one thing. When Lac-Mégantic happened, I was still in the U.K. We studied it as firefighters, and I recall seeing a firefighter say that he arrived to a wall of fire and there was nothing they could do. There is nothing that causes more feelings of helplessness in a firefighter's mind than to show up at an incident and not be able to do anything.
That is the problem that you face. We can have all the safety issues we want and we can have all the safety plans, but in that time between it happening and our actually getting control of the situation, that's when that time belongs to the community.