Emergency Manager

Alain Normand

Someone once approached Alain Normand at a conference and said, "You’re the only one in the city who’s paid to be paranoid!” The emergency preparedness manager had to agree: "I always have to look at the worst-case scenario. I always have to say ‘What if?’” Alain Normand fell into the emergency preparedness industry while living in Gatineau. At the time, he was in a managerial position with the city’s police and fire department. "We had a police chief who was very proactive on the emergency management front. He wanted to have plans, he wanted to have things in place, and he assigned me to make sure the emergency management plan was in place.”

From that point on, Alain knew he wanted to pursue a career in the field. "You can see the results of what you’re doing. You can actually take direct action. That’s what got me into this field.” Today, Alain is Emergency Measures and Corporate Security Manager for the city of Brampton. The political science and public administration graduate spends most of his time in meetings, liaising with disaster aid businesses, police and fire departments, and charity organizations such as the Salvation Army. "My role is really coordination. I am the catalyst to get all these people together.”

Alain’s job is not to tell organizations how to respond to emergency situations. "We just want to make sure everybody knows what they should be doing and that they know what everyone else is doing.” These meetings are sometimes one-on-one with the organization; other times, they’re with other disaster aid agencies. "We need to know if we call upon them, what exactly they are going to be able to offer us.” Alain meets regularly with all the groups participating in Brampton’s emergency disaster plan. "We can’t resolve in one meeting all the different kinds of scenarios and situations we could be faced with...we go risk by risk.”

He helps develop emergency response plans depending on each type of emergency and has trained more than 500 city staff in emergency preparedness. "Our goal is to ensure they know how to respond to an emergency situation.” But there are drawbacks to Alain’s work, including the public perception that government will do everything necessary to protect people during an emergency. This is a myth that Alain must dispel daily. "We only have the quantity of staff needed to respond to the average number of daily emergencies Brampton experiences.”

In the case of a large-scale emergency, there aren’t hundreds of firefighters and police officers ready to respond to the big call. If a large percentage of the population was affected, it could be a long time before Alain’s team responded to every single individual. "We need people to realize that they have a responsibility for themselves; that they have to prepare themselves in terms of emergency management.”