Five years ago, a gigantic ball of fire lit up the nighttime sky in the small community of Otterburne. Hanover’s Emergency Planning Coordinator still calls this the most significant event of his career.

“The number of the explosions that have happened in past 50 years are very few,” comments Coordinator Denis Vassart, “I’ve seen nothing anywhere near as extensive as that.”

Vassart says 921 homes across southeastern Manitoba were directly affected by the explosion and notes that his crews worked somewhat frantically to set up temporary warming shelters and provide supplementary heating to those who lost their natural gas.

He commends his response crews for doing an incredible job during the crisis. “We were scrambling for a little bit,” he admits, “but overall we did pretty well and nobody lost a home or a business because of it.”

Though Vassart feels his team helped dramatically curb the negative effects of this crisis, he says there were still some valuable lessons learned.

“We’ve beefed up our hazard analysis and now have a better idea of where all of the hazards are in the RM of Hanover including transfer stations and major gas lines.”

Other improvements include better evacuation procedures and more detailed utility outage plans. Vassart says the incident also improved his relationships with disaster response crews at Manitoba Hydro and TransCanada who were also heavily involved during the incident.

On top of that, Vassart indicates he has now developed a specific protocol of what to do during explosion-induced mass utility outages, though he does not expect that will happen again for a good long while.