Enhancing emergency preparedness and response

How do you prepare for an emergency? It’s a question environmental emergency officers with Environment and Climate Change Canada’s (ECCC) National Environmental Emergencies Centre work on every day. During an environmental emergency like an oil spill, these officers provide critical advice to responders about the best ways to clean up spills. They also help predict the possible impacts of a spill on water by projecting where it may go based on models, or simulations, of the water’s flow or currents.

It's that attitude that took Simon and Environmental Emergencies Officer Frederic Chantal-Fortin to Iqaluit, Nunavut, in 2022 to gather information on how spill-tracker buoys respond to wind and currents.

Their project centred on launching spill-tracker buoys into Frobisher Bay. Bright orange balls the size of a basketball, the buoys transmit timestamped information about their location and water temperature as they drift with wind and currents. This allowed ECCC scientists in the Emergencies Science and Technology Section, who generate models that anticipate the movement and behaviour of a spill during an emergency, to check the buoy’s actual movement against modelled tracker drifts.

The team also gained important practical experience from the exercise, from the cold temperatures out on the water to working with Frobisher Bay’s massive tides, which can leave boats sitting on the sea floor at low tide.

“It’s very interesting,” Frederic noted.” It’s another dimension that you have to get your head around to really plan the work.”

Finally, getting to know their counterparts at other organizations in the area was an additional highlight of the trip, which piggybacked onto several other emergency response exercises in the bay.

If you were to stand on Triangle Island on a spring day, you would have no idea you were in the middle of the largest seabird colony in British Columbia. At nighttime, though, the skies surrounding the island are busy highways filled with birds shuttling food from the ocean to their cliffside burrows.

Triangle Island is the outermost of a string of islands off the coast of British Columbia surrounded by the Scott Islands marine National Wildlife Area. It is located in a transition zone where the North Pacific Current splits into the southward-flowing California Current and the northward Alaska Current. It also sits close to the continental shelf break and deeper waters.

The island, with its steep slopes and strong winds, is most easily accessed by helicopter, and only authorized personnel can land there. Under the Oceans Protection Plan (OPP), ECCC scientists have been returning to the island each year for the spring breeding season, when seabirds come to land to nest.

Since seabirds primarily live at sea, breeding season is one of the few opportunities for scientists to study certain species up close: measuring weight and wingspan, taking samples and tagging birds with GPS trackers to follow their movements.

Since the 1970s, ECCC scientists have been studying the island’s Tufted puffins—a large, burrowing seabird with a colourful bill sheath and golden feather tufts that are both lost come winter.

The puffins are declining across their range, but more so in the southern colonies. Triangle Island hosts the largest Tufted Puffin colony south of Alaska, with almost 30,000 breeding pairs. “It sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, compared to colonies in the eastern Aleutian Islands that support hundreds of thousands of pairs, it’s pretty small,” Mark explains.

During the summer of 2023, Valerie Wynja and Zhaohua Chen from Environment and Climate Change Canada were in Nunavut, flying in a helicopter just 300 feet in the air, taking photos and video of the stunning coastline.

But Valerie and Zhaohua weren’t there as sightseers. The photos and video footage they collected are being used to classify shorelines in priority areas across the Canadian Arctic—allowing scientists to identify sensitive areas that will need to be protected in the event of an oil spill or other environmental emergency, and providing a trove of open data for all.

Under the Oceans Protection Plan (OPP), we are working to provide responders with the information they need to protect the environment from spills and help its recovery after an emergency.

Over the course of six days, Valerie and Zhaohua flew 18 hours and documented over 2,300 kilometres of coastline around Lancaster Sound and Parry Channel.

It was their second survey trip of the summer as they worked to gather baseline data on the Arctic as part of the OPP.

Each type of shoreline is impacted by spills in a different way: oil can harden on rocky shores or sink into the mud in a tidal flat.

Flying at low altitude along the coast, Valerie and Zhaohua captured the different types of shorelines in the area.

The photos and videos were geotagged—marked with the geographic location—so that analysts could go through the images later and record the shoreline types on a map.

Datasets like these are provided to responders who can use the information to quickly prepare a response and recovery plan as soon as a spill happens.

Finalized datasets can also be accessed by anyone through the Open Government Portal.

The information from the surveys can help with local shoreline planning, coastal development, habitat management, or even with studying coastal erosion.

Visit the Open Government Portal to see the results from other shoreline surveys and learn more about the different types of shorelines in Canada!