B.C. Hires Plot Expert as Wildfires Reuse the Script
With more than 20,000 people fleeing and a state of emergency declared, officials have created an absurd new office to stop recurring disasters being marketed as fresh developments.
British Columbia’s wildfire emergency becomes the grim backdrop for an invented Office of Disaster Continuity, tasked with stopping governments from presenting recurring crises as surprising new sequels. The satire targets institutional amnesia while treating evacuees and emergency crews with due seriousness.
VICTORIA, British Columbia — British Columbia has appointed its first provincial continuity editor after declaring a state of emergency as wildfires forced more than 20,000 people to flee, an invented administrative response intended to ensure that the latest catastrophe is no longer presented as an exciting new instalment in a franchise everyone had already asked to cancel.
The fictional Office of Disaster Continuity will examine evacuation orders, emergency declarations and official expressions of unprecedented concern for inconsistencies with previous seasons. Its staff will also maintain a large binder marked Things We Were Supposed to Learn Last Time, which officials say has until now been stored in a secure cabinet between “long-term planning” and “maintenance budgets.”
The real emergency, reported by Al Jazeera, Reuters and other outlets, has displaced tens of thousands and demanded the sort of immediate public attention that governments generally prefer to schedule after a consultation period. The satire begins and ends with the bureaucracy; the danger faced by residents, evacuees and emergency crews does not require embellishment.
A familiar production
Provincial officials said the continuity editor would sit beside emergency planners during briefings and quietly raise a hand whenever someone described a recurring problem as unforeseeable. The role has gone to the entirely fictional Crispin Backlot, formerly deputy assistant coordinator for Institutional Déjà Vu.
“Our first responsibility is public safety,” Backlot said in a quotation that is also entirely fictional. “Our second is preventing ministers from looking surprised by the same category of event in consecutive episodes. Viewers notice these things, particularly when the viewers are carrying suitcases toward an evacuation centre.”
Backlot’s office will compare each fresh announcement with earlier announcements, checking whether lessons were learned, recommendations implemented and solemn promises transferred safely from podium to filing cabinet. Where continuity errors are discovered, officials will be asked either to correct them or explain that the discrepancy reflects a bold new narrative direction.
“We cannot keep calling every recurring emergency unprecedented merely because nobody opened the previous briefing notes.”
The government’s fictional guidance advises spokespeople to avoid phrases such as “nobody could have imagined,” unless accompanied by evidence that all meteorologists, firefighters, local authorities and residents had spent the preceding months imagining something else entirely.
Emergency operations themselves would remain under the command of real professionals rather than satirists, consultants or anyone whose principal qualification is possessing a lanyard. The continuity office would concern itself solely with the political theatre surrounding disaster: the grave lecterns, the determined nodding and the annual rediscovery that smoke remains difficult to negotiate with.
Critics request an ending
The imaginary opposition critic for Recurring Plotlines, Moira Ledger, welcomed the appointment but questioned whether one continuity editor could keep pace with a political system capable of forgetting an entire previous crisis before the microphones had been packed away.
“This government has confused continuity with repetition,” Ledger said, fictionally. “Continuity means remembering what happened. Repetition means commissioning the same inquiry with a slightly bluer cover.”
Municipal leaders, represented here by the invented Mayor Douglas Firbank of the nonexistent town of Administrative Creek, said communities did not need another dramatic season finale.
“Residents would prefer the boring programme,” Firbank said. “The one where mitigation is funded, routes are planned, warnings are understood and everyone goes home at a reasonable hour. It reviews terribly but is excellent to live through.”
That, regrettably, is the central difficulty with prevention. A fire engine against an orange sky produces a compelling photograph. Years of land management, infrastructure work, emergency preparation and climate adaptation produce a spreadsheet, several meetings and perhaps a culvert. Civilisation has always found the former easier to televise and the latter easier to postpone.
The continuity office will therefore issue colour-coded annotations on future policy documents. Green will mean “completed,” amber will mean “announced,” and red will mean “announced again after everyone forgot the first announcement.” A fourth category, beige, has been reserved for measures referred to a committee until the weather develops other plans.
No reboot available
Backlot said his team would not attempt to rewrite the current emergency, in which people have had to leave homes and communities under threat. Instead, it would concentrate on the institutional habit of treating foreseeable strain as a shocking twist delivered by an unusually aggressive screenwriter.
“The public has seen this genre,” he said. “They know the opening scene: ominous conditions, urgent warnings and authorities insisting they are monitoring the situation. They know the middle: evacuations, exhausted crews and podiums multiplying overnight. What they are asking for is a different ending.”
One is reminded, inevitably, of every disappointing sequel in which the scenery is larger, the stakes are higher and the characters have inexplicably forgotten everything learned in the original. The crucial difference is that cinema audiences may leave after two hours, whereas residents of a fire-prone province cannot simply walk out and demand a refund on the climate.
The office’s first report is expected to contain no dramatic revelation. It will merely observe that emergencies are less surprising when records are kept, warnings are respected and preparation occurs before the horizon changes colour. Officials have promised to study the findings closely, provided they can locate the nearly identical findings from the previous instalment.
For now, the real work belongs to evacuees, emergency personnel and communities confronting the wildfire threat. The fictional continuity editor will remain at headquarters, sharpening a red pencil and waiting for someone to call the next recurring disaster a once-in-a-generation event without first specifying which generation they mean.
