B-C’s public safety minister says a rewriting of the Emergency Program Act involving wildfires, floods and even COVID-19 will now include heat waves in order to help prevent deaths related to extreme temperatures.
Mike Farnworth says municipalities across the province have opened cooling centres, but it may be time to mandate such a response. He says the province will await chief coroner Lisa Lapointe’s recommendations in a report to be released in a couple of months.
Farnworth says there have been three heat-related deaths in the past five years, but Lapointe says at least 486 sudden and unexplained deaths have been recorded since Friday, and she expects most of them are related to the unprecedented heat.
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