Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Emergency Management Act requires communities to prepare and adopt and maintain emergency plans and programming. MACA did support the communities through these -- through workshops, exercises during -- to prepare for these emergency, public alert testing was also conducted, public awareness and information. Starting in 2021, community emergency planning workshops were temporarily suspended due to COVID-19 pandemic. Since the pandemic started and refocused on updating community emergency plans to increase capacity to respond to the flooding. Due to the emergency response required for the spring 2021 flood season, some communities have deferred progress on their COVID-19 surge plans.
But then going back to the question, I'm just reading off of the notes, but you know, that during the flood season, I did travel over to Fort Simpson, and I did work with the MLA from the riding as well too. These were questions that I was asking - how did the community respond, how did they prepare, what does this look like, how could we have further determined what these water levels would look like.
I was soon to discover that, you know, we do have surveys that are done, conducted through ENR, that would be able to determine what this flood season could possibly look like. But the magnitude of the flood this year was nothing that was to be expected. But prior to the flooding in the affected community of Fort Simpson and Fort Resolution that were severely affected, there was EMO training that was provided prior, and there was workshops that were provided as well and also the support from the regional office, from the headquarters office, to support those emergency management plans.
And then it's -- this is going to be a long answer, but then I also further had to discover that, you know, did the community have the capacity? Did they have the capacity to work with the -- to work with the individuals? I soon came to discover that the community was under a lot of stress. There was a lot of people that had lost their own personal items, their homes, and that, you know, should we go back to that time? You know, there's always going to be lessons learned through the response as well too. So looking at that, we are going to be working with the communities once the flood season is completed. We are going to be travelling into the affected communities of Fort Simpson, Jean Marie, Fort Good Hope, and Aklavik. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.