Disasters that bring people to the emergency room — like fires, floods, heat waves and other extreme weather — often also strike the hospitals themselves. With the number of climate-related emergencies expected to worsen in coming years, experts caution that some parts of the country will need to move quickly to disaster-proof life-saving infrastructure.A giant fireball is seen as a wildfire rips through a forest near Fort McMurray, Alta., on May 7, 2016.
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. Disasters that bring people to the emergency room — like fires, floods, heat waves and other extreme weather — often also strike the hospitals themselves, Ness said.
The threat varies across the country. One study found 10 per cent of Canada's hospitals and major health-care facilities were located within a 100-year flood zone, Ness said. It could also be as simple as installing air conditioning to combat extreme heat, as high temperatures become increasingly common."I guess the opposing question is, can we afford not to do something about this?" he said.
That kind of future-proofing was highlighted as a priority in a massive report issued by Health Canada in 2022, called Health of Canadians in a Changing Climate.