The City of Kamloops is looking to expand the Provincial Emergency Operations Centre in Sahali.

Mayor Ken Christian says the current Operations Centre has served the Kamloops area well.

“But we’re finding now that it gets activated more often that it used to and we want to see Kamloops as a hub for the province’s response to emergencies that are unique to the Interior of British Columbia,” said Christian.

He says the expansion will make sense for the area as Kamloops is at the heart of the action when it comes to some responses to forest fires, evacuations, and flooding.

“The ability of Kamloops to provide some redundancy to central government should there be a major emergency on the coast, we wanted to just make sure that they would be cognizant of our capacity here in Kamloops both in Thompson Rivers University as well as the city to be able to host some of those things,” added Christian.

He says the city had meetings with Emergency Management BC at last month’s UBCM convention, in the hopes of moving the discussions further along.