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Calgary’s orderly evacuations have borne this out, he said, but if people do panic, Mr. Rekers said, it is usually because of mixed messages about the severity of the threat.

“Panic is if you stand there staring at it, going ‘Ohmigod, ohmigod, I don’t know what to do.’ The thing that causes panic is mixed messages,” he said. Audiences work best if you give them all the information now: good, bad and ugly.

“When they get back to downtown, they’re going to find out the truth,” he said. “They’ll make their own assessments at that point…. Preparing people for something worse, and actually finding out that it wasn’t that bad, is a lot better result than saying it’s all good, and then finding out it’s all bad.”

To illustrate, he recalled a mid-tier law firm with 40 staff in Brisbane that stored all their files in the basement and evacuated before the flood, expecting to return in a few days.

“Ten years worth of records lost, including their disaster management plan. That’s where they kept it [in the basement]. Three of the law firm’s partners houses were flooded. Within six months, that branch had lost over a million dollars’” he said.

In Calgary, Mr. Rekers said the acid test for that blunt honesty will be the message from city authorities on whether the iconic Stampede, scheduled for two weeks from now, will go ahead. Mayor Naheed Nenshi has said it will, though it may “look different” depending on the state of recovery. Mr. Rekers wondered whether that is even possible.

“My fear is that people are not thinking about the bigger picture,” he said. “Water is the least of your problems. The water will go away, and it could go away in the next two days. The problem is all of the silting that’s in there, so the drains are now full of silt. There’s going to be buildings that are possibly going to be demolished, or at least have substantial rebuilds, and we’re talking downtown hotels, and so on, where we want people who are coming to the Stampede to stay, so there’s not going to be accommodation for them.”

National Post

jbrean@nationalpost.com