Live Friday on the Wildfires, Floods and Chaos Communications Podcast with Tim Conrad

Hello it's Tim with the Wildfires, Floods and Chaos Communications Podcast and next up is a recorded version of the live video I hosted today on LinkedIn and YouTube. It is also our 25th episode! 

Thank you for sticking with me and us as we continue to develop episodes. 

Listeners in 60 countries with another milestone coming very soon - thank you, or in Carrier, Mussi Cho. 

We just hit 125,000 views on our YouTube channel too. 

Here's the first live...in a recorded version. Let me know what you'd like in the next one.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (00:03.042)
Well, hello there.

I'm not sure how long it's going to take for people to join me or if anyone will join me, but I'm happy to be here. Hello, it's Tim Conrad with the wildfires, floods and chaos communications podcast. I'm here with what is the first live Fridays and I'm hoping that we can make these live events a little bit more often. And who knows where they'll be. Sometimes they'll be in a studio. Sometimes they'll be on the side of a road. But I am hoping that I can.

join the audience and have you join me and interact with me as we go. Obviously, got to build that audience out and see where we can get, but really excited to get going and to try this. Now, this isn't my first live, not by a long shot. So it is my first live in quite a few years. I think it's been about nine years since I've done one for the business. However,

When I'm working for projects for clients, I've done a ton of lives because we often do them during wildfire, floods, and landslide events and so on. yeah, these are quite often how we go. And of course, lots of people are doing lives now. yeah, so it's an exciting time to be able to do these sort of things. So while I'm waiting to see if some folks join out there, one of the first questions I had, if anybody was paying attention,

to the promotion that went out about this live was, does anybody know the airspeed of a unladen swallow? As a Monty Python fan, it always brings up the question, does anybody actually know and what is the impact and are we prepared for such things as an unladen swallow? So, you know.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (02:00.237)
This movie came out actually the year I was born. So and I love it so much. And Monty Python and the Holy Grail was just a fantastic fun and ridiculous show much like all of the Monty Python stuff has been. So I thought I'd fill a little time with that to see if anybody can come up with a response as to why an Unladen Swallow both is important and why we haven't figured this out yet.

and why this is not a key message for most emergencies and so on. anyhow, some other things that I've got coming up, I just wanted to go through and we'll give you a sense of what other things to expect coming up in the next little while. So we do have our CRH Net Symposium coming up, I'll be speaking at, that's the Canadian Risk and Hazards Network Symposium.

So April 26, just a couple days from now is the last day to register for the symposium. This symposium is in Edmonton this year. This is the first time they've hosted it in a little while. And I just wanted to point out that Edmonton happens to be home to the, you know, best NHL hockey team. So in case you're wondering where that is, and...

I hope maybe I'll get to outside of a game while I'm there. I got to one a few years ago while I was in town for another event, and it would be awesome to be able to catch it. If you ever have that opportunity, what a great little moment to go just be outside the arena for a playoff game. And it's just a really cool experience and cool atmosphere, very, very, very lively. it was great. And in particular, I loved it. Even though I'm based in British Columbia, I am no Canucks fan.

So the night that I was there, the Oilers came back and beat the Canucks in that game. it was special. So anyhow, from May 12th to 14th for the CRH Net Symposium, I will be there to do a poster session and a lightning talk. And I'll be talking about the Pathways to Preparedness project. A little bit more on that in a bit.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (04:12.865)
but this is my only speaking gig I have left for the spring. I've actually gone with a little bit lighter schedule because I knew life was going to throw some curve balls at me through the spring. I decided to go with a little less this year. yeah, so last opportunity, if you'd like to come out and see me, look forward to seeing you there. So we also have some new podcast episodes coming. So I recorded two episodes.

almost a year ago, and you'll soon get to hear and see them. So first off, I want to recommend that you go back and listen to episode 12. It's a case study about the 2008 Nova Scotia Porter's Lake and Lake Echo wildfire. This was the first time that social media misinformation in an emergency appeared for me and many of the people that I worked with. And so we talk about that in that episode a little bit. You get a quick overview of kind of that event.

and so on. Well, I went back. I responded, I was part of the response and recovery team with that event. And it was at the time the largest wildfire that Nova Scotia had seen in almost 40, I think it was 44 years. They've since had multiple fires that have eclipsed that. However, it was a big event. And it was just on the, in that urban environment just outside of Halifax. And it was a terrible fire.

It was very aggressive. It was backed by over 100 kilometer-hour winds and went through an extremely dry area that had been affected by a hurricane. So lots of blowdown and lots of deadfall that was there. So it was quite a dramatic fire. Very scary to see, to be honest. And didn't matter where you were, you could see it and it looked scary. So...

I went as part of my role back then. I was working with the provincial government and I worked together to put together a video to thank responders and volunteers that was included in an event that I also was a part of coordinating. And part of that video, there was two people in it that I really wanted to talk to again. And so I did. I found them. I tracked them down. Paula Danilak-McDonald was the principal of the elementary school.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (06:38.057)
in the wildfire zone. And the impact on children from the intense wildfire was traumatic. They were in the process of evacuating at the time. They were going home from school. So they were on school buses already when things started to happen and children got split apart from their parents sometimes by hours because of where the fire was and just where they had to send kids safely. kids were on one side of the fire, parents were on the other.

And like I said, visually, this fire was a spooky one. And so it was very traumatic. So she shares things that they did with their school populations, the impacts that they saw, techniques that they used to help children navigate that trauma, and of course, how they communicated. It's a really good interview, and I'm super excited to get it out there. So you'll see that coming up in the next couple of months.

Gary Straunak is my other guest from this wildfire and he is a resident who remains in the house which stood between the only two homes that burnt down during that wildfire. So we had a very heartfelt conversation about survivor's guilt, community recovery and the importance of gratitude. So those are two really interesting episodes that tied to episode 12. So make sure you go back and listen to that Porter's Lake one.

to get a little bit of sense on that. And you'll hear from Paula and Gary coming up in the next couple of months. In addition to these two, I go all the way back to British Columbia to have a chat with Williams Lake First Nation Fire Chief, Paul McCarthy. We look at his experience as a settler working for a First Nation and how navigating incidents is different and a reflection on the challenging

late wildfire season that we saw last year in 2025 and really ran straight into the end of September up in the Caribou region. You'll also be hearing more often about information technology and other current important topics as we switch to provide some variety of formats and more podcast content for you. So I've been working on some things on the background. Some people have been helping me to put things together and to make them

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (08:55.669)
make sense looking at different ways. lot of the last couple of years of this podcast, while I has been derailed a couple of times because due to personal things that have been going on, I've been working on learning a lot and trying out different things. And sometimes you've seen that whether or not you've noticed, that we've been experimenting with a lot of different things and how to do them. So you're going to start to see that we're going to have a lot of different formats coming out in the podcast, hopefully a lot more episodes and.

and a lot more information coming your way. It is a lot of work putting together these episodes, and it begins with your story and guest ideas. So let us know what's on your mind and for ideas at communicationspodcast.com. And want to hear whether you've got an idea for around maybe how an episode could be put together. I'm open to other ideas of how we could do episodes differently than the typical talking heads.

And yeah, I'm looking forward to trying some different ways out over this next little while now that we've kind of learned the ropes of podcasting, both video and audio. All right. So I don't know if we've got too much for people online. I got to learn how to use this system. It's new to me. We've got some over on YouTube. That's good to see. Hello over there. We are broadcasting to three different locations. So both on our YouTube channels, the Butterfly Effect YouTube channel.

as well as the Butterfly Effect LinkedIn page. And there is also a link for Riverside, which is the program that we use to record in. And you can listen and watch that link anywhere. Now, I've just given that one out to some friends just to hopefully a few of them dial in and take a watch. But yeah, we'll see how it goes. I'm just going to keep blabbering away until we get to the end of an hour. And hopefully somebody will join in and chime in and.

Give me some thoughts, but maybe they won't. I don't know. So I had a few things to talk about. We'll go through some stuff and yeah, we'll see where it takes us. So one of the things I wanted to talk about this week is uncomfortable and tense conversations and the importance of having them in emergency operations centers. So give me a moment to grab a drink of water here.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (11:27.051)
So public information officers who I strongly recommend should have a public relations or communications education or someone with that kind of education that they can lean on for support because public relations professionals are used to pushing people outside of their comfort zone during issues and crisis management. In fact, we train for it. Our job is to

have difficult conversations behind closed doors so that when we have the conversations out in the community and out in public, we've kind of worked out all the kinks and we've tried to find all the things that could go wrong. So you want to have someone that has a public relations background in your back pocket. It becomes extremely important as an event evolves because they get very gnarly and start to get very complex and

PR professionals are very used to navigating extremely complex issues and crisis management. Some of the issues I've managed in the past and crisis I've managed in the past have stretched over years and very intense involving lawyers and all sorts of different parties, all sorts of different groups that are speaking up loud. so it's something that we get used to in our profession.

So getting into an emergency, it, we're just doing a little bit faster perhaps than what we sometimes do. But honestly, sometimes it's not even faster. We do work at extreme speeds at times when we're doing crisis and issues. So someone like myself, there's lots of others out there, but you want to look for somebody with an issues and crisis management background in public relations as well. That comes with time. It's experience. It's not somebody self labeling them.

as themselves as a crisis and issues management expert. We have a lot of those right now. They are working for all types of firms. I've seen them working for even real estate and accounting firms and saying they're public relations experts, which they don't actually have any if you actually look at them. So it's important to have the experience that you are saying you have and to know that it's a risk when you say you don't have it in public relations. It's actually a very big liability. And so I carry big liability insurance with this.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (13:48.546)
company to cover us if there are things said that are wrong or that there's things omitted or the strategy maybe not the one that we should have used. So you have to have lots of different protections in place. Public relations professionals also know trends. They know the impact of current events. They know how

to develop strategies to navigate difficult situations with both internal and external audiences. And they also really do a good job of looking at the big picture. How does it impact the organization? How does it the partners of the organization, the employees within the organization? These are things public relation professionals are all trained to do. If you've ever taken public information officer training, which I...

I actually do teach through the J-A-B-C separately from this company. But when we teach that, it's very specific to emergencies and events and incidents. absolutely, can people do that job without being a public relations professional? Sure they can, yes. When you should be concerned is if it's ongoing for some period of time or if it's a really kind of complex issue. Lean on people with that experience. Trust me, it is worth its weight in gold.

So there's lots of us out there. I'm not saying you have to reach out to me, but we are available and please reach out to those with public relations and crisis and issues management background. If you want to get yourself navigating through some of these situations.

Another thing you want to make sure is to never surround yourself with people who think the same. You want people who challenge your decisions. So if you go on to our Butterfly Effect Communications page, so butterflyeffectcommunications.ca, you can see our team of associates. They don't have the same opinions that I do. We have some great conversations on different projects as we're working on them.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (15:58.862)
I always tell me, I often bring up the thing, tell me I'm wrong or, you know, am I right here? And they'll, they're usually pretty honest. And, we, we, we go from there, but it's important to surround yourself with people who will challenge the way you think. A group of people who always agrees with you creates a danger and it's a serious danger. we want to make sure that people are not in a position where they are.

creating a dangerous situation down the road because we're all thinking the same thing and we're not thinking about the big picture. And we miss out on that piece of information or we ignore somebody in the room that was bringing up something that maybe we didn't like hearing. Well, it's important when you hear something that you don't like hearing to hear it out, to hear more of it, to understand it more, to understand where it's coming from and to understand the impact it could have.

One of the main causes of the Challenger Shuttle explosion way back in the 1980s was they ignored issues which were raised by some people, stayed the course, and it resulted in deaths and significant costs. Obviously, that was a global event, a global crisis when that happened. All eyes were on that event when it happened. And it was because a lot of people, they were using groupthink and they missed out on some of the critical errors

that were being highlighted for them and they didn't have that opportunity to come back and fix it. So it resulted in people dying, unfortunately. So why do we want to make sure of this? Because we want the best decisions possible in the moment so we can avoid conflict and issues as well as crisis later on. It's not easy. It isn't. It's a difficult thing to do.

I have been yelled at, I have been told off many times, I have been told I'm an idiot. However, I've also had apologies come back later from those same people when they realized that maybe they should have been thinking about it a little differently. And maybe they were a little bit too narrow in their thought process. So we are trying to, I am somebody that when you put me in a room, I am gonna challenge your thinking.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (18:26.047)
Everybody that works with me on a regular basis knows that. I'm going to come in and I'm going to challenge you almost right off the go. Why are you thinking that way? Why are we doing it that way? Have we thought of this? Have we thought of these people? I'm going to run through a bunch of things and I am going to challenge you. And I also want people to challenge me. I'm not afraid of that. You won't hurt my feelings. And I want you to do that because we want the very best decision possible.

You have to remember that people on the end of our decisions and communications are often not provided any choices. They are given a direction that emergency managers provide and that if that direction is not fully thought through, it has a direct impact impact on the people and the incident. So those people don't get a choice. You do. So when you have it, have those difficult conversations because later on,

It becomes much more difficult if you've made a poor decision and especially if it's hurt people and caused them harm.

So, yeah, it's, there's a lot that you can learn by surrounding yourself with people who will make you think differently. And it's made me, you know, I've been lucky. I had somebody young, when I was young, that said to me, don't ever be ashamed by having to change your mind. And don't ever be ashamed by someone.

proving to you that you were wrong. And so I love being proven wrong. It's something that when somebody does it, I'm super happy. I'm actually more happy for them than I am if I was to do it myself. So I think it's wonderful. And so we need to realize that no matter who we are and what our background is, we can always do better. We can always come up with better decisions. Seek those who will give you opposing views.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (20:32.703)
challenge your thinking and push your response to be as strong as it can be. You may be smart, educated, and you may have status. That does not mean you are correct, as you may not have the lived experience or other input which therefore could cloud your judgment. The best EOC directors and leaders I have worked with always ask, what are we missing? What are we not thinking about? And who is left behind?

So today's big lesson is let's challenge our thinking when we're out there doing emergencies. Let's really, really grind and work hard to come about the best decisions. Let's work in those meeting rooms when we're in emergency operations centers or in a crisis or in doing issues to really dig in, to really challenge people. Because I'll tell you, it's a really good feeling when you walk out of that room at the very end of things and things have gone well. Maybe it took a lot of hard conversations.

But boy, you're going to be a really tight team at the end of that, too. And it's a really awesome and fulfilling experience to be challenged, to be honest, as a group. So get out there and do it.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (21:50.958)
So these live sessions, I am hoping to do these as often as possible. It's a challenge for me as I work in both rural and remote areas of Canada. So sometimes I'm more connected to a tree than to Wi-Fi. And it's, you know, we'll see how it goes. But I will do my best and we'll switch up the times that are going to happen. Sometimes they'll be on the mornings on Fridays or the afternoons, perhaps in the evenings. And then I'm also going to look at maybe it's a live Tuesday event.

or a live Sunday event, who knows? So you'll see me pop on. Sometimes I'll pop on just for a few minutes and we'll take off after that. So I hope to see some guests joining me for some live episodes and sometimes maybe even a few people will join so we can have some conversation. So I really hope that people out there will start to look and to join in these conversations. Live is so much better if you interact. So please jump into the comments.

and onto that like button so that I know that there's humans out there. It's good to know that you are out there. And I hope as well, while I'm at it, that your week has gone okay and that you're gonna have a decent weekend ahead.

So an opportunity now to tell you a little bit about some of our training programs that we offer. So we do lots of training and we do it based upon real scenarios that we've experienced. There's no fluff and theory here. It's just a grinding reality. I did one not overly long ago and we were in about 15 minutes.

And my participants looked at me with sweat on their brow and they said, what is going on? And I said, welcome to an emergency. This is how it runs. And so it was a real cooker. And that is what I sometimes put people through. I want you to experience what it is really like. I have been, I've been fortunate enough to be on some amazing, amazing teams with some

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (24:03.531)
incredible people across Canada working on some very, very large events that have gone on for over 100 days. And I've done a lot of 100 day events over the last bunch of years. And so we bring that in because that's the reality that you will face at some point in time. Since I experienced the 2017 Caribou wildfires here in British Columbia, I've been saying to lots of people, you are not ready. And I still stand behind that.

Despite all of the preparedness and work that has been done across this country, when the big one comes, you'll find you're not ready. It is an unreal experience and it completely changes your system, it changes you, and it changes your team. So you may think you have experienced the big one yet, but I will tell you once you do experience the big one, you'll know what I'm talking about.

I've been through a bunch of them. My first, would probably say, was in High River in Alberta in 2013. And then we've had multiple since the 2017 Caribou wildfires was a 77 day long event. But then we've had 100 day events multiple times over, including three in one season. So they're just a unique beast. And what they do to people and how they really just hammer away at populations and your volunteers and your responders.

They really test every bit of your system. They will make a disaster out of anything that is not complete, not ready, or just isn't good enough. I left the 2017 wildfires thinking, well, I shouldn't say this. I should flip this around. I entered the 2017 wildfires believing I knew everything about managing wildfires and emergencies and disasters.

And remember driving away that first day, the first day after when I had my first day off and I was drove away and I was like, I don't know anything about what I'm doing. I feel so, such a lack of confidence in how to do the job going forward. And so it required us to work together as a team, to come up with a whole new way of doing things. And we put that in place and had some amazing, amazing results.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (26:34.003)
So we're soon launching the Become the Broadcaster workshop again. We've had some demand from some clients, including some that have come back from several years ago to say, hey, do you think you could do that workshop again? So I kind of retired it it wasn't really intentional, it just happened. And I'm revising it right now and also doing a really neat thing. And so if for some people or people in organizations, when you take the Become the Broadcaster workshop,

you will get a full kit of equipment to set up and develop your own audio and video. So we're gonna bring in all of the equipment that you need, nice and easy to use equipment, not the stuff that we use, because we do use some nicer stuff that we can tinker with and fool around with a little bit more. But we use very simple stuff to make it easy for you to go from producing to...

out to the public as quickly as possible. So you'll get a full kit of equipment. You're going to get the mics, the camera, all of the things to do, the lighting, all of it as part of this. And yeah, we're also very excited to be refreshing this workshop and adding some new features into it and new information and new training for you. So watch for that one. It's coming soon. We also do media training.

although it is part of our speaking confidently workshop. We know because of the work that we do that it's getting more rare for people to speak to media. So, and we also know that there is big, big money being charged for media training and we're not like that. I've always had the view that I'm not going to charge you what I think you'll pay. I'm going to charge you what I think it's worth and what I think is there for value.

and I'm not going to overcharge people or organizations. I'm more interested in you getting the information and getting that education from it and the experience. So our Speaking Confidently Workshop is a program built to prepare you for any speaking setting, including media. So it prepares you for all of the circumstances that you will be in because most people

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (28:58.443)
don't speak to media that often, but they do speak to lots of other people very often. You speak in meetings, whether they're just small group and staff meetings, or you speak in public meetings. You may speak at an event for your family. And even if you're speaking to your kids, this course is handy, or your family. How can you speak more confidently? How can you put your thoughts together better? And how can you get them out of your mouth, right?

So our speaking confidently course is there. You can find it on the butterfly effect communications website. And yeah, it's a really good course. It's gone over very well with this revision to take it away from just being media training, which I'll be honest, I think is dead or dying. There are certainly some markets where it's more important, but I do believe that we just don't see the need for that particular

driving skill like we used to because you may take that workshop but then never use it for another year. So this course is to help you to speak confidently all the time and over and over and over again so that when media come it's just another day.

So oddly, we aren't known for our public engagement work. Our emergency work often overshadows it. So we have been doing public engagement work for a couple of decades, whether it's with the company or in other roles that we've had. And I ramped it up about a decade ago to include IAP2 public participation. So this is a very different way of looking at it. Public engagement to me is a very narrow definition.

And public participation is a very long and more strategic and ingrained process that allows us to have ongoing conversations with residents and people that are affected by decisions if necessary. So love the IEP2 program. It's the International Association of Public Participation. Lots of people are trained in it and including us.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (31:09.735)
And but it's a program that we use very often in the work that we do now. Our experience is mostly intense and critical emergencies and crisis. So we know how to manage all the others as well. But we don't have to be so frantic in those moments when we're not doing emergencies and crisis. We've been.

We've done some really cool work with wildfires, floods, even a little bit on the land side of things as well. Some of this experience includes a current project with the Carriere-Sacanay Family Services, who is a First Nations organization coordinating 11 First Nations as they bring family and children services back to nation control. I am so excited to be part of this project.

You may not know this about me, but my family, as well as my wife's family, goes back. We are among the first settlers to arrive in Canada, our family ancestry. So we came in the mid 1700s and we have been here ever since. And so this project is just such a neat one because our family and our ancestry has been here for a long time.

I'm not too pleased with the way that Indigenous people have been treated over those hundreds of years. I do not know if my family was part or my wife's family or anybody that families that I know were part of the terrible things which happened to Indigenous communities. What I do know is I will be part of reversing some of that damage. And I'm very proud of that, to be part of this project and hopefully some others that are similar.

We are looking forward to winding the damage back and allowing that control to return to the people who deserve it. And those are the people in our First Nations and the Indigenous peoples of this land, which we call Turtle Island. So I'm so thankful to have that work and it's been really, really interesting. It's going to go on.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (33:26.637)
for the next three years and it's actually one of the largest projects of its kind in Canada. So we have with their organization, we'll be helping them and supporting them as they do almost 300 engagement events over the next few years. We also had a public engagement during the 2023 BC Shoe Swab Wildfires, which I kind of touched on a little bit earlier. We went into an extremely

tense and threatening situation here in British Columbia. It's actually not that far away. I could see the wildfire out this window when it was happening very clearly and could even tell you what rank fire it was burning at that particular time.

This fire had probably the most tension I have experienced in Canada during a active emergency. The community and the responders were not on the same page, unfortunately. And we were called to help to bring some calm to the chaos. And so we came in just as the fire started to explode. So literally in that 24 hour period when things went really bad,

we showed up and started to get to work. So it took us a few days, but within a few days we were able to get things rolling and get a system in place that started to calm things down, allowed responders to get out there and do their job again. And we also immediately started to activate a public engagement process, which I've actually not fully ever done. We've done some little engagements, little one-offs here and there, maybe a couple, two or three.

but nothing strategic and planned. So we, the moment that we walked through the door on this, when we began to do that, and the idea was to learn as much as we could during the emergency so that it could help them to prepare for recovery. And also it provided an opportunity to really listen to residents that were, you know, not feeling heard, that were, that there was a tension there and it was to the point of being violent.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (35:40.226)
violent threats and there was also theft and sabotage of responders equipment and it just wasn't a good spot. So it allowed us to get out and listen to residents. That meant listening to people yell. That meant having death threats right up in front of my face. It meant a lot. That was hard, hard work and it's what we do. And we got out there, we had lots of conversations with hundreds of people.

And it was kind of cool because we put a report together and then there was a what we heard report put together by another consultancy after the wildfire and it was nearly matched what we had collected. So we're quite proud of the fact that we were able to pull it off during an emergency. Anybody that's done a public engagement process knows, hey, if you want to go out and plan like a over a dozen public engagements, you're going to need a few months. Well, we didn't. We had days.

and we also had a reentry to do and we are still dealing with active wildfires and we still managed to pull it off and it was a really cool thing to be part of and just a phenomenal team. I'll lay some names out there. You've seen them on the podcast. You can go back and listen to the first seven episodes of the wildfires floods and chaos communications podcast and hear from a bunch of these team members. So you've got Brie Thorstenogel, Mike Lupien, Kendra Stoner, Michelle Toma,

Leila Dowd, who else am I missing out there? Lloyd Peel. Gosh, I know I'm missing some others, but they're just a phenomenal team that I had to work with. yeah, just go and listen to those interviews and those podcasts, because there's lots of good information in there. Not just from the Shoe Swap Wildfires, because we were at three different activations that summer. All three were up to close to or past 100 day activations.

So I was a three-headed person that summer supporting those three events.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (37:50.301)
So at the same time that year we were also preparing and leading a 36 event preparedness engagement in the BC region of the Caribou again. So the Caribou Regional District hired us along with fund thanks to funding from the Canadian Red Cross going back to the 2017 wildfires and in the 2023 they got us to go out and listen to

residents and understand why residents weren't getting fully prepared for emergencies, whether they be small emergencies, such as a host fire or a flood in your house to larger emergencies that affect an entire community. We weren't seeing and hearing about people moving that significantly further. There was little incremental jumps, but nothing big. So we went out.

36 different events over a period of, think it was five or about five months. And all across this huge area, I think I traveled something like 4,000 kilometers to get out there, as well as some other people that were on the team and collected and just had one-on-one conversations where we really dug in and helped to understand what it was. And that was a really cool public engagement process that was happening while we were doing some of these other wildfire things as well.

So this Pathways to Preparedness project, as I mentioned, was funded by the Canadian Red Cross and was the first ever project examining why residents were not getting prepared in a region where disasters are close friends with them. They experience them very often. And in fact, as I'm recording this, their Emergency Operations Centre is active right now. And it's, you know, April 24th, you know, and that's pretty early for them.

But that's the reality of the Caribou region. There's always active wildfires almost every season up there. And then they deal with some floods from Fraschette, particularly spring Fraschette being the runoff from all the snow melting. And then they also have had the landslides such as the Chilcotland landslide. So they've experienced a significant amount of stuff. And that project was so cool. So if you want to learn about that project,

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (40:14.689)
Your opportunity is to come to the CRHNET symposium in Edmonton. Again, register in a couple of days is your deadline. And May 12th to 14th, it's in Edmonton. Come join me. Come have a chat. I'm going to be in this poster session, which you'll just be able to come up and talk to me. I'll be there all afternoon. I think it's afternoon, morning, whatever it is. And come and ask questions, see the information. Lots of other poster displays there as well.

on our emergency response side of things. I wanted to talk a little bit about that and I wanted to check in with folks out there. How are you doing? While we don't have anybody chiming in yet on our conversation on the YouTube channel or LinkedIn, we've had some coming and going and things like that, but how are you doing responders? So please add your comments to the video if you see this. Let's chat about you for a moment.

So right now we have across Canada floods in Ontario and Quebec to a very big snow. In parts of Newfoundland, they hope to see light in their windows sometime soon as snow finally melts down low enough that they can see out their windows. One of those years, holy smokes, Gander. That was an impressive snow pitchers. I've got some friends up in that area and holy smokes. I'm sure glad I didn't have to shovel that all the winter.

And then we've got landslides and wildfires happening in British Columbia. It's a busy one. It's a busy one right now. April is very busy. Tend to see that the spring wildfire season kicks off. This is a lot of times before the greening up of things happens in Canada. So you'll see that that spring wildfire season does shift. So it'll shift up and kind of goes from south to north. And then what happens is the

The summer wildfire season kicks off and works its way up too. So they can often get a little tight together. But you we do usually see a smidge of a break in between the two. Hopefully. So the problem is, is there are rarely years off anymore. And it's been very hard on people. So I just wanted to say for a moment to take care of yourself first. I have a rule on my team.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (42:32.269)
that you are either 100 % or you are not ready. So be careful not to enter an event when you've got something unresolved in your personal life. Take that time that you need to recharge. Make sure your battery is 100%, that things are OK at home, and that you can get away for a long period of time. Keeping in mind, yes, you might get called away for one week, or you might have to go into the office or the EOC for what you think is one week of long days.

and it turns into weeks and then maybe months. So think ahead a little bit. If you need a week, a month or a year, you take it off. So some members of our team, they have opted to take a year or two off and I support that whenever that happens. And it's okay because we need to recharge our batteries. This is extremely hard work doing emergencies and it's extremely hard work today. As we know,

The public is not always supportive of things that are being done and decisions that are being made. They don't understand why. It's our job to explain why and do a better job communicating, but it's a big project and it takes time. So we are one big team and we need to look out for ourselves and for each other. So please make sure you are 100 % before you put yourself out there to be ready for an event. So.

it's extremely important to always, always look out for yourself first and then of course look out for each other. So our river, I'm in Kamloops here in British Columbia. We are by the North Thompson, closest to the North Thompson River, actually not too far from the South Thompson either. So the rivers meet here in Kamloops and boy have they come up fast in the last 72 hours. So we are into a full freshette.

So that's the spring runoff season, as I mentioned earlier. So this is all of the winter snow coming at us and coming down and coming down the mountains. And boy, I'll tell you, it really puts in perspective how much snow is in those mountains every year and how big the mountains are. Here in Kamloops, we have a river that is just a slow little meandering river for most of the year. And then for this period of time, for about two months.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (44:52.141)
There's this massive increase in the amount of water that comes down and the height increases. The width goes just gigantic compared to what it normally is. And it is cooking along speed wise as far as how much water is going by. We're up to three, I think it's probably, I didn't look today, but I'm going to guess it's around three cubic meters per second. They're going by across this massive river that in some parts I'm sure is getting up close to

a half kilometer or even a three quarters of a kilometer wide. So very big. And it's kind of cool because when I walk, I walk my dog down on the beach here quite often. And during the winter, when I walk down along the water's edge, the sand dune is over top of my head. I cannot see over the sand dune unless I crawl up over. So right now today, that river has already crested that sand

sandy area so that's what is our beach is mostly gone at this point so it's up well above my head so it's about you know say 10 feet to do that distance and then on top of that it will continue to increase in height and it will go up another you know could be 10 to even more feet depending on how much snow we've got to melt this year and how quickly it's coming at us so

We like nice slow melts when they happen. We don't want those rapid, fast, raining events and or heat waves, which we had a few years ago and caused some challenges for flooding communities. So we want a nice, slow and easy melting off period. And of course, we don't want a huge amount of snow in the mountains when it starts to do that. So this year's a little bit, most areas of British Columbia, a little bit less than average.

But what we've seen is a lot of really pockets where there's lots of strong, like a lot of snow, and then some pockets where there's hardly any. So it's very mixed this year. So we have some spots that are going to be experiencing drought really quickly on in the season, and other areas where there may not have too much for drought this year. So it's a very mixed bag heading into this season.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (47:10.655)
So I encourage you, if you're ever out in British Columbia, pay attention to the rivers. Look at them. They do change, especially this time of year. And the other thing I'll say is be extremely careful around the rivers this time of year during melting periods and flooding. I can tell you they're extremely dangerous. I've been part of rescues that happened and unfortunately, recoveries that happened in those situations.

It happens. It's not good. So just the best way is to stay away from those rivers and keep yourself safe out there.

So another part is I want to talk a little bit about our video production today while I'm just testing out this equipment. our next one you're going to see a little bit more come in. The next one I'm going to start to fly in some other content. You're going to see some things flying up on screen, I hope, and maybe even some sound effects. Who knows what's going to happen? I don't know. We'll figure it out. But one thing that we don't talk about is too much is our video production side. Now, if you're keen and you're paying attention,

You know that we've done a lot of video production.

as well as audio production. But we don't market it as a separate business or offering. It's just been something we've done on the side. It's part of the operation that we do. I have always been a photographer, and I've started to get quite interested in video. then along with the podcast, we've got quite a presence now in the media world.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (48:52.557)
So it's been a really cool thing to do. So we produce lots of different photos and videos, audio productions, all sorts of different things. And we've done it for lots of different, particularly emergencies, but also a lot of different projects that we do. But I'll just say on the emergency side, especially to any public relations professionals that are out there listening, you'd be extremely jealous of how many views that our videos and.

and productions have had because during emergencies, there's a lot of eyes watching and wanting more all the time. So we get some insanely good numbers on some of the stuff we've done. We've learned a lot. We produce very high quality things and we produce very low quality things. We've actually found both ends work great. So it really does depend on doing that measurement, trying to figure out and aligning with the audience and figuring out what works best.

We have ability to record large group to small group engagements or meetings. So that's capturing audio in a room or video in a room so that that can then be transcribed and then processed through a system that we have created that allows us now to then turn that data into something useful and tie it to analysis and results and connect through to a full engagement.

So we're starting to do some really cool stuff where we're tying together that engagement process and the technology and knowledge we have around video and audio to help us to do better engagements and provide better data. We also do evidence and situational awareness, photography and video in the field. So this is actually where I got kind of started in this side of the world. So before I was doing

any emergency response as a public information officer, I was doing photography for evidence and I helped to establish the ability for digital photos to be accepted into court in Canada quite a long time ago. imagine that film was the only way to go at one point in time.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (51:13.329)
And it was expensive, to say the least. And we had new digital technology coming in, and the courts weren't accepting it. And to me, that wasn't acceptable. So I worked with our local law enforcement, and we came about some things working with lawyers to come up and present to the court how you could look at photos and know that they were real. And

you know, be able to accept them as evidence in court. So we continue to do that today. We are often pulled upon when we're out there doing emergencies and disasters to go out and do situational awareness of, so capturing photos and videos in the field and capturing what has happened and the historic events. I also in my travels, I go back and visit the spots I've been before.

emergencies that I've been to before and incidents and capture follow-up images. And I have a huge historical backlog of library of information, a library of images and photos and I'm saying the same thing, imagery. How about that? Been talking for a long time. So we are fully portable and we're able, we have an incredible group of producers and editors.

So if you require something beautiful, we can help you. But if you require something simple and quick, we can also help you there. So we're coming to the end of an hour. I've babbled on the entire time. It's been great. I've seen some people joining in and popping in and out. I'm not looking for huge numbers this time around. We're going to experiment with this. We'll keep trying out and testing this format out.

I'm just really excited to finally be here to be trying out this live space with the Wildfire's Floods and Chaos Communications Podcast platform, which you can learn more over at communicationspodcast.com. So it's been great. I hope that there's been a little bit that you've gotten out of this today. If you have guest ideas, if you'd like to leave us a review, if you'd like to give us feedback that you...

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (53:35.628)
Maybe we should have done something different. Please send it to us. Go over to the website, communicationspodcast.com. There's a contact us button there. You can also, through that page, you'll see all of the episodes. You'll see the video episodes, if there's any tied to the audio episodes, so you can listen to audio or video. You can find all the platforms that you can listen on. Our video just goes on YouTube for the most part, so you'll find that on there.

Yeah, we're excited to be here. And I hope out there that you will tag in and let me know what you thought. And what would you like to see? What would you like to see on these live episodes? And I'm open to doing whatever I'm going to go out. I'm going to shoot some this way where I'm in the production studio here at home in my home office. Or we're going to go out. We're going to pull out the phone.

or we're going to pull out some of other gear. So I'll pull out that. I'm going to show you some of the gear here in a moment. So just let me bend down and then I'll let you go.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (54:50.485)
All right, so as I said, we have lots of different photo and video equipment to be able to do almost anything that we need. I've been asked to do things over the years. The fun part is sometimes I get asked, hey, can you go get some aerial shots of this? I was like, where's the helicopter? Which sometimes they've got me one. But to help with that, I have a drone now too. So we have that. We've had that for a few years and it's been used. You've seen some of the images of that.

during some of our emergencies that we've done. we also have a full mic set. We have full studio set of lighting. And yeah, just a lot of really good equipment, teleprompters, the whole bit of it. So to work out in the field, though, you require lots of different equipment and lots of different lenses. so over the years, I've been adding and continuing to expand our abilities in this.

area. And this is perhaps one of the bigger beasts of the kit. It gets its own bag. So this is our biggest lens that we have in the settings or in the equipment. This is a 300 to hold it up here so you can see the whole thing. It's a 300 to or sorry.

I'm saying this wrong, 60 to 600 lens, a 60 to 600 millimeter lens. So to give you a sense of how far can I see with this, I can sit on the side of a road and get somebody's picture on their face as they're approaching on the road from two kilometers away. So I can see if they're happy or sad or not. So it allows us to go and to work with different incidents where maybe we can't get that close to get a view of something. And this is also.

The cool part about it is it's an action lens, so it allows point and shoot really fast. So can get some pretty cool shots with it.

Tim Conrad (timsbits) (56:57.201)
And yeah, otherwise we've got lots of other equipment that helps us to do our job. So we're here if you need us. I really want to put out there though, for all of those responders, all those public relations professionals, the public information officers, all of the responders. When I say responders, I want you to all think about emergency operations people, the volunteers that are out there, the firefighters, the paramedics, the police.

everybody else, search and rescue. I don't want to miss anybody. So you know who you are. You all contribute to helping during emergencies. And I want to just thank you. You're the helpers. You come, show up, you're there every time. And we're just at the start of what will be the busier season here in Canada. And I want to wish you well. I want to wish you safety. And I want to make sure you take care of yourself this coming season. And

I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Thank you for joining me. My name is Tim Conrad. I'm the host of the Wildfires, Floods and Chaos Communications podcast. You can learn more about it at www.communicationspodcast.com. It is a production of Butterfly Effect Communications, copyright 2026. Goodbye. Hear me later. Thanks for joining.