Why Halifax didn’t use its city-specific hfxAlert system during the recent wildfires

Questions around N.S. emergency alert use Halifax used emergency alerts to let residents know about evacuations and rescinded evacuations instead of its existing public alert app.

When the wildfire in suburban Halifax broke out May 28, the provincial Alert Ready system was used to tell residents to flee.

Alert Ready pushes emergency notifications automatically to cell phones, televisions, and radio frequencies, interrupting regular programming.

More than a week later, the same system was used to then rescind those orders several times.

That led city councillor Shawn Cleary to wonder why the city didn't use its own system — known as hfxAlert — for those important, but less urgent messages.

“I had also heard from a number of residents, ‘why didn't we use it?’ And my suspicion was that there's just not enough people signed up on it yet,” Cleary said.

His suspicion was correct.

The municipality introduced hfxAlert as a mass notification service in 2019.

It’s a free service meant for both urgent and non-urgent messages to be received by phone and email, but residents have to sign up for it.

According to the city, it has 17,500 subscribers right now. Cleary says about 5,000 were added during the wildfires.

Halifax’s emergency management director would like to see much more.

“Just looking at best practices, is 50 to 60 per cent of the population,” Erica Fleck said.

That would mean having at least 240,000 subscribers.

Fleck said the city does plan to use hfxAlert more often moving forward in hopes of boosting its usage.

“We'll really be using it a lot more throughout the extreme weather events and other crisis events,” she says, “because you know, let's face it, biggest fire in history, and who would have saw that coming.”

“I had a community meeting last night and I told them, ‘listen, we can create community groups on (hfxAlert) that if you have an emergency in your community, you can call me and I can send out an alert to your community,” Fleck said.

“Again, it’s volunteer signup,” she adds.

“If we had a system set up where we could alert people of important information for the whole municipality, or specifically for their neighborhood,” Cleary said, “that would be a great way to communicate instantaneously.”

“It would be wonderful to have everyone sign up for (hfxAlert), then we could use that kind of alert system rather than scaring the bejesus out of people on their phones,” he added

Jacob Westfall, chief technology officer of Public Emergency Alerting Systems Inc. (PEASI), one of the partner companies that delivers the Alert Ready system, said he was pleased to see the province use it’s emergency alerting system.

“It was great to actually see them using (Alert Ready), that certainly hasn't always been the case in the past,” Westfall said.

There is a function for non-urgent messages, but it’s also based on voluntary signup and doesn’t get “pushed” automatically to users.

Alert fatigue, he said, is always a concern in crisis communications, but he said it’s better that alerts are used than not.

“The key thing is that they use the system, sometimes we think we're communicating enough, but we're really not, we can always communicate better and more,” he said, “the opportunity to improve your communications and even over-communicate if necessary, is always better than the alternative.”

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