On May 28, 2025, an entire way of life vanished in 72 hours. The community of Pukatawagan, Manitoba—home to families, children, and generations of memories—was completely evacuated as wildfires advanced across northern Canada. By June 4th, over 17,000 people had been displaced in what Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew called "the largest evacuation within the province."
But here's what the headlines missed: the biggest challenge wasn't fighting the fires. It was keeping families connected when everything they depended on for communication simply stopped working.
When Infrastructure Becomes Kindling
Bryan Preston, a member of Canada's Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 4 (CAN TF-4), was on the ground during the Pukatawagan evacuation. His assessment was stark: "The biggest problem would have been communication." The community faced a complete power outage, forcing emergency teams to scramble to establish Starlink internet just to coordinate the evacuation effort.
Think about that for a moment. Professional emergency responders—people trained for exactly these scenarios—struggled to maintain basic communication during the evacuation. If the experts had communication problems, what happens to regular families?
The scope of Canada's 2025 wildfire crisis reveals just how quickly modern communication infrastructure can collapse. With over 160 wildfires burning across Canada and provinces declaring states of emergency, entire regions lost the basic services we take for granted: electricity, cellular service, and internet connectivity.
The Helicopter Bottleneck
Patrick Thiessen, another CAN TF-4 team member, identified a second critical challenge: limited aircraft. "We had a little bit of trouble with the wind," explained Eric Umpherville, fire chief for the northern community of Brochet, describing conditions during the evacuation. When you can only move people out a few at a time and weather conditions are deteriorating, every minute of coordination becomes crucial.
Here's where most family emergency plans fall apart. They assume everyone will leave together, in the family car, with their cell phones working. But what happens when:
- Helicopters can only take a few people per trip
- Family members are separated into different evacuation groups
- Cell towers lose power and phones become useless
- You have no way to tell your spouse whether your children made it onto an aircraft
The Canadian evacuations show us that separation during emergencies isn't just possible—it's often inevitable.
The 48-Hour Communication Blackout
During the Pukatawagan evacuation, families experienced what emergency experts call a "communication void"—that terrifying period when you have no way to know if your loved ones are safe. Power grids failed. Cell service disappeared. Even emergency responders had to jury-rig internet connections just to coordinate rescue efforts.
Stephanie Couturier, a CAN TF-4 member involved in the evacuation, described the challenge: "We had names and information from everybody... So anybody that hadn't come to the evacuation centre, we were able to make contact with and make sure that they knew what was happening." But that was only possible because professional rescue teams had established emergency communication systems. Regular families had no such backup.
The Manitoba government didn't complete the Pukatawagan evacuation until June 2nd—nearly a week after the initial evacuation order. For families separated during those first chaotic hours, that meant days of not knowing whether their loved ones had made it to safety.
Lessons from 56 Active Wildfires
Alberta's experience adds another layer to the communication crisis. As of June 3, 2025, Alberta was battling 56 active wildfires, with 27 classified as "out of control." The province deployed over 1,000 personnel and various aircraft, but evacuation orders remained active for multiple communities including Chateh, Loon Lake 235, Peerless Lake, and Trout Lake.
When entire regions are under evacuation orders simultaneously, the normal assumption that "help is on the way" breaks down. Emergency services become overwhelmed. Communication networks fail under the load. Families get scattered across multiple evacuation centers in different towns, provinces, or even countries.
The Alberta government offers emergency evacuation payments to displaced residents—$1,250 for adults and $500 per child for evacuations lasting seven or more days. But what good is financial assistance if you can't locate your family members to begin with?
What Business Evacuations Reveal About Family Preparedness
Hudbay Minerals' response to the Manitoba wildfires provides a masterclass in emergency communication planning that most families could learn from. When evacuation orders threatened their Snow Lake operations, the company immediately:
- Enacted pre-established emergency procedures
- Enabled "controlled, safe and orderly temporary suspension" of operations
- Maintained communication with local authorities about resources
- Established a $1 million support fund for evacuated employees
- Created a Community Relief Donations Fund with employee matching
Notice what Hudbay didn't do: they didn't wait to see if cell phones would work. They didn't assume everyone would be able to reach each other. They didn't hope that normal communication channels would survive the crisis.
Instead, they activated predetermined communication protocols that didn't depend on vulnerable infrastructure. They had plans for maintaining contact with employees even when normal systems failed. They established multiple ways to coordinate resources and support.
Most families have no equivalent system. Their "emergency plan" consists of everyone's cell phone numbers and maybe a meeting spot that no one has actually verified they can reach during a disaster.
The 20-Year Reality Check
Here's the data that should worry every family: Canada has experienced its 10 largest fires in history within just the last 17 years. This includes catastrophic fires like the Camp Fire, Paradise Fire, Woolsey Fire, and Caldor Fire—disasters that burned over 100,000 acres each and killed hundreds of people.
Climate patterns suggest this trend will continue. The 2025 Canadian wildfire season started earlier and burned more aggressively than historical averages, with 160+ fires consuming 1.56 million acres by late May—40% above the 10-year average for that time period.
What this means for families: the scenarios we're seeing in Canada—mass evacuations, infrastructure failure, communication blackouts—aren't rare events anymore. They're becoming the new normal for millions of families living in fire-prone areas.
Beyond the Family Group Chat
Most families' emergency communication plan amounts to a group text and the assumption that everyone will answer their phones. The Canadian evacuations prove how inadequate this approach is when real disasters strike.
Consider what happened to families in Pukatawagan:
- Power outages meant cell phones eventually died and couldn't be recharged
- Cell towers lost power, making the phones useless even if charged
- Evacuation by helicopter meant strict weight limits—no room for charging cables or backup batteries
- Family members were split between different aircraft based on availability, not family units
- The evacuation process took nearly a week, far longer than any cell phone battery lasts
By the time families were reunited at evacuation centers, some had spent days not knowing whether their loved ones had survived.
The Rubberband Solution: Planning for Communication Failure
Traditional emergency planning assumes communication will work when you need it most. But the Canadian wildfire evacuations prove that assumption is dangerously wrong. When 17,000 people need to disappear in 72 hours, the systems we depend on daily simply collapse.
This is exactly why comprehensive disaster communication planning has become essential for every family. Rather than hoping cell phones will work, families need multiple independent communication pathways that function even when infrastructure fails.
A complete communication plan includes predetermined meeting points that don't require cell service to coordinate, backup communication methods that work without internet or power, and resource sharing strategies that function even when normal supply chains are disrupted. The plan needs to account for family separation, infrastructure failure, and extended displacement—exactly the scenarios Canadian families faced in 2025.
Most importantly, the plan needs to be printed and stored in multiple physical locations. During the Canadian evacuations, families who had digital emergency plans stored on their phones discovered those plans were useless when the phones died or lost service.
The Next 72 Hours
The Canadian wildfires offer a preview of what millions of families will face as climate patterns make extreme weather events more frequent and severe. Mass evacuations that seemed unthinkable a generation ago are now annual occurrences affecting tens of thousands of people.
The families who survive these disasters with their relationships and sanity intact aren't the ones with the most supplies or the biggest emergency funds. They're the families who planned for communication failure before the crisis hit.
The question isn't whether your area will face a disaster that disrupts communication infrastructure. The question is whether your family will have a way to find each other when it does.
Want to create a comprehensive disaster communication plan for your family? Rubberband makes it easy to establish multiple communication pathways, predetermined meeting points, and resource coordination strategies that work even when normal systems fail. In just a few minutes, you can build the kind of robust communication plan that helped professional rescue teams coordinate during the Canadian evacuations. Don't wait for the next emergency to discover your family's communication gaps—start building your plan at https://rubberband.us