By Eileen Buckley
Toronto, Ontario – The recent arrests of 17 suspected terrorists in Toronto has been added to this week's World Conference on Disaster Management in Canada.
Emergency management experts from 40 countries are gathering in Toronto Monday for a three-day disaster conference. Adrian Gordon is president and CEO of the Canadian Center for Emergency preparedness. He says the recent arrests of the alleged terrorists in Toronto is up for discussion. Gordon says they need to examine what these arrests mean for ALL of Canada, and he believes this is a real wake up call for Canadian citizens.
"But we are eternally grateful for the actions of our security services and police in preventing what looks, on the face of it, to be some extremely unpleasant incidents that could have claimed a lot of lives and injures," said Gordon.
Experts who experienced the aftermath of terrorism will be attending Toronto's conference, including those who worked at the Oklahoma City bombing site and the bombings in the U-K. But the impact of several natural disasters in 2005 will also take center stage, like the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and Rita, the tsunami in Sri Lanka and other world disasters.
"We will have a session on the flooding in Bombay, where they had 36 inches of rain in 24 hours. We have terrorism, the LaSalle Bank fire in Chicago, a whole list of things,and we have a very full agenda for this conference," said Gordon.
The conference will also focus on health disasters such as the impact of a flu pandemic, particularly the threat of bird flu.
In all, 80 disaster management sessions will be held.