A wall of flames met David Matear when he finally stepped outside of the downtown Fort McMurray hospital, after the final patient was hurried out of the building and into a waiting bus.
Matear oversaw some of the work as the incident commander. He later went on to work in British Columbia, which endured terrible wildfire seasons, and helped hospitals in Manitoba and California weather waves of COVID-19. And with the number of climate-related emergencies expected to worsen in coming years, some parts of the country will need to move quickly to disaster-proof life-saving infrastructure.“I think every health authority, every health ministry in every part of the country should be thinking about this.”
“The results were quite surprising,” he said. “Even under existing climate conditions, plenty of facilities are in high-risk flood zones.” When two backup generators failed, hundreds of patients, including 20 babies from the neonatal unit, had to be evacuated from the New York City Hospital. “Adaptation measures that get ahead of the curve of increasing climate impacts on ecosystems, infrastructure, communities and health systems will need to move beyond incremental approaches to adopt transformative changes,” the authors of the report said.