St. Albert Gazette
By: Brett McKay, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Now that the smoke has cleared in Jasper, RCMP say it appears nobody was left behind during the evacuation. Some residents however, stayed in their homes until the final moments, with walls of flames surging toward the community and embers raining down.
“In this particular situation, we were able to evacuate over 25,000 people,” said Trevor Daroux, Assistant Commissioner with RCMP K Division.
RCMP worked closely with other emergency service partners and the community during the evacuation. Without this collaboration and support, major operations like the one in Jasper wouldn’t be possible, he said.
The RCMP Tactical Support Group, an on-call team made up of members from across the province that responds to major events, allied with Alberta search and rescue teams to sweep the town looking for people who stayed behind following the evacuation order.
“We went door-to-door through the community of Jasper to ensure that there were no more people in the community,” said Const. Lyle Korver, with the RCMP Tactical Support Group.
After the first sweep of the town, 41 residences were found with people still inside. By the time a second sweep was performed later in the same day, many people had left and only six homes were occupied.
“The day that we actually pulled out of the town of Jasper, there was one remaining residence in the town. Our resources went and assisted an elderly couple who chose to leave at that time,” Korver said.
The couple had medical concerns and were assisted by the response team, he said.
When the decision was made to pull everyone from the townsite except firefighters with SCBA gear, Korver said “the RCMP remained at the edge of town. We were the last ones to leave to ensure the security of the town.”
Ten members of the RCMP Tactical Support Group responded immediately to Jasper during the disaster to help with the evacuation, and that number has since grown to around 20, Korver said.
Now that the area is being stabilized, officers are taking more of a security role, Daroux said.
“We want citizens to know that when they are away from their residences, we are going to do everything we possibly can to ensure that those residences are safe,” he said.
“Once the order is given by the Emergency Operations Centre, then we are going to look at how to bring people back into the community.”
Daroux said there have been no reports of crime in Jasper since the evacuation, and the RCMP will continue to restrict access to the through highway checkpoints.
The Jasper RCMP detachment building survived the fire unscathed, Daroux reported, and they are currently working to get power and water reconnected so that when the order is given to return to town, they are prepared to do so.
