After a series of 10 virtual community meetings / information sessions we will be pausing for the summer unless circumstances change significantly. Great gratitude to Hollyhock for the use of their zoom account, to Ayton for being our technical wizard, to Cortes Radio for broadcasting these meetings live and Radio Sean for all his help, and Roy Hales from Cortes Currents for your reporting – Audio recordings from and articles about all meetings are archived here https://cortescurrents.ca/tag/covid-response-conference/

The last community meeting was on ‘All Things Fire’ with guests from the BC Fire Service, the SRD Emergency Preparedness Program, the Cortes Fire Department, and the Cortes Community Forest. You can listen to the recording and read Roy's summary here https://cortescurrents.ca/all-things-fire-the-june-9th-cortes-virtual-community-meeting/. We discussed how to fire smart your property (see https://firesmartbc.ca/) including removing combustible materials from around your home, installing sprinklers on your roof and having extra water reserves on site for fighting fire. We reviewed the recent SRD chipping service which removed many tonnes of combustible materials from your yards. The BC Fire Service and Cortes Fire Department spoke of how they respond to local fires and discussed how to further improve training and communications. And the Community Forest spoke of how they manage the forest to reduce fire risk whenever possible and the further work they would do with supportive funding.

I am so very grateful to all of you who have responded to these remarkable times in calm and thoughtful ways that hold the well being of our community at their heart.

I wish you all kindness and sweet summer enjoyment in the months to come.

With all my love to all of you,
Noba Anderson
Regional Director
Directorcortesisland.com, 250-935-0320