While the smoke drew a grey blanket over the landscape, Northerners in Yellowknife and its surrounding communities shut their windows and doors tight, hiding from the air. It had already been a long and stressful summer across the NWT. By mid-August, more than two thirds of its residents had evacuated, some more than once. Before and after evacuations were called, residents opened their phones and turned on the TV desperate to know what was happening.
Taking over the screen was a burly, bearded young man wearing a yellow NWT firefighter’s coverall and a black baseball cap. Thirty-two-year-old Mike Westwick, whose official job title is Manager of Communications and Public Affairs for the Department of Environment and Climate Change (ECC), did not fit the clean-cut image of a government communications officer, but he quickly became recognizable everywhere he went.
He spoke in televised interviews with local, national and international press. He also kept evacuees informed about what was happening back home, offering the kind of details about the fires that were most important for Northerners — wind speed and direction, air temperatures, ground temperatures, number of “boots on the ground,” the distance of the fires from our home communities. Westwick was the guy with those numbers, and a knack for giving us the information we all craved.
“In crisis communication,” he says, “there is a philosophy that I live by — in an environment of uncertainty, details help.”
Westwick is not a Northerner by birth. He grew up in Mission, B.C. and attended university on Vancouver Island. While working at a 7-Eleven in B.C. he heard about an communications opportunity in Yellowknife for IServeU — an organization promoting open-source, collaborative decision-making that aimed to give everyone a say in government policy. While some might have been skeptical of how it would work, Westwick was keen on being part of the innovative idea, while getting to explore somewhere new.
A year later, in 2016, IServeU was still not up and running as Westwick had said in 2016 to CBC, “we overshot our ambition.” He eventually moved on to work for various GNWT departments as an information officer. One of the main foci of his training has been in all-hazards emergency management. As someone who has always been interested in crisis management, he took on the role of communications officer for Health and Social Services during the first year of the Covid pandemic. It was a strange and difficult time in people’s lives, but Westwick says, “there’s no other time where you feel a greater calling to help others.” His ability to remain calm, collect information and share that with others was Westwick’s way of doing his part.
“I began to understand firsthand how people respond to emergencies and to understand the anxieties that people can feel in a crisis. I became a better communicator.”
It wasn’t always easy, as even experts in public health didn’t have all the answers. “But ultimately it’s just about providing timely, accurate and actionable information to people in terms that they understand and to recognize the anxiety and uncertainty that they’re feeling.”
Which brings us to this past summer. Ahead of the wildfires, the fire management team discussed the outlook for the upcoming season. Everything predicted a very tough summer, mainly because of the expected drought conditions. Still, none of the information they had could have prepared the GNWT for the impact this wildfire season had on people and communities, says Westwick.
“We were dealing with an emergency on a scale that was new to us and there were a lot of people who really rose to the occasion.
After the first community evacuation in May, Behchoko followed on July 24 and residents headed to Yellowknife for shelter. Nearly two dozen structures had burnt down and in the following weeks, communities like Fort Smith, Hay River and Yellowknife all evacuated. The town of Enterprise left only a few houses standing and it seemed there was no end to the dry conditions and strong winds coming their way.
Westwick was on the fire lines as much as he could be, even tagging along on a few helicopter surveillance flights, to get the most accurate, real-time info available for Northerners.
“There’s value in someone being out there,” he says. “It gives you a clearer idea of what’s going on and the scope of the thing.”
But Westwick was not the only one gathering information for the public. He was one of five team members in his department, each assigned to specific fires as the hundreds of raging wildfires burned out of control. This meant ping-ponging back and forth between communities.
“I was in Hay River and K’atl’odeeche for their first fire in May and June,” he says. He moved to Behchoko in July, to Yellowknife and then returned to Hay River for nearly three weeks.
“I’ve been honoured to play a role in this huge event,” he says “It’s been special to work shoulder to shoulder with people who have been fighting wild fires for decades.”
He also praises the leadership shown in the communities, thanking K’atl’odeeche First Nation Chief Martel, K’atl’odeeche Fire Chief Mike Sunrise, Hay River Mayor Kandis Jameson, Hay River Fire Chief Travis Wright and Enterprise Mayor Michael St. Amour, for their work.
Now, in October, it feels safe to say that this fire season is finished. Westwick, along with everyone else who worked on the fires, is due a well-deserved rest. The job of a communications team isn’t by its nature very physical, but in times of crisis it can be mentally fatiguing from having to be on at all times and knowing that thousands of people are relying on you to accurately and promptly share information. You have to do what you can to avoid burnout.
“We were careful to see that people got a couple of days off every two weeks,” Westwick says. “It has been a long summer for everyone.”
Westwick says everyone develops their own coping mechanisms for handling the stress and fatigue. For him, it was compartmentalization.
“My heart was breaking for people this summer, but you’ve got a job to do and you’ve got to find a way to cope with what you’re feeling inside.”
Now that the fire season has ended, one of the biggest takeaways for Westwick is the power of the natural world.
“I’m a city boy, so the role of the natural world was really brought into focus for me,” he says. “We’re co-existing with this huge living, breathing organism, the boreal forest. Sometimes it’s going to make decisions for us.”
The function of an information officer in an emergency is to tell people what’s going on, says Westwick. It’s not about public relations. He points to studies that show the public won’t panic if given information in a crisis. People are resilient, he says, and adaptable. They just want to know what to do to keep each other safe. Faced with existential threats, we fall back on community.
“That’s when you often see the best in people,” he says. “That sure became obvious this summer.”
Although stressful and at times scary, throughout his career, Westwick just buckles down and does what he needs to do.
“You need to get timely information out, you need to have a focus on care and comfort. You need to be available and fill in the blanks as much as you can when there is so much uncertainty.”
