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With climate emergencies becoming more common, Chara Metchooyeah, an Indigenous youth, is helping her community stay safe.
When wildfire smoke rises on the horizon, most teenagers aren’t thinking about evacuation logistics, but for Chara Metchooyeah, they’re the first thing that comes to mind.
The young member of the Dene Tha’ First Nation’s Chateh community in northern Alberta can still recall the exact moment the May 29, 2025 wildfire emergency interrupted her school day.
“It was 2:33,” she says without hesitation.
A text from her mother alerted her to a fire burning nearby. Within hours, community members were fuelling vehicles, emergency staff were coordinating transportation, and preparations were underway to evacuate nearly 900 people if conditions worsened.
While many people would describe the experience as frightening, Chara remembers something different.
“I just had an adrenaline rush,” she says with a laugh. “I wanted to get to work.”
That reaction hints at why community leaders see so much promise in her. Nineteen-year-old Chara has become one of the youngest volunteers on the community’s emergency management team and is preparing to study the field through the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology’s Disaster and Emergency Management program.
Her interest came naturally. Her father serves as a volunteer firefighter and her mother introduced her to emergency management during the 2019 Chuckegg Creek wildfire. At just 11 years old, Chara helped assemble food hampers for residents who remained in the community while evacuation routes were threatened by advancing flames.
Then came COVID-19 and another kind of emergency. Community teams organized food deliveries and support services for vulnerable residents, and Chara helped where she could.
Those experiences introduced her to a growing field that extends far beyond responding to disasters. Modern emergency management focuses largely on preparing for crises before they happen: identifying risks, developing evacuation plans, coordinating transportation and communications, and ensuring vulnerable people receive support when emergencies unfold.
In Chateh, those responsibilities take on added urgency.
Located hundreds of kilometres from major urban centres, the community has only two main roads leading in and out, and Grande Prairie, the nearest major city, is roughly six hours away. If wildfires or floods threaten those routes, options become limited.
“Our community has four evacuation plans,” Chara explains.
Those plans include multiple road routes and even helicopter evacuations if necessary. Families maintain go-bags and stay alert to changing conditions because they know they may receive only hours — or sometimes minutes — of notice.
“Many people may see an evacuation as simply leaving for a few days,” Chara says. “But for us it is much more than that.”
In remote communities, an evacuation can mean leaving behind homes, livelihoods and cultural touchstones without knowing when it will be safe to return. Elders may require transportation assistance, and entire communities can find themselves displaced for weeks.
The increasing frequency of climate-related emergencies is making preparedness even more critical. Chara has noticed the changes herself. Wildfires occur more often than they did when she was younger, and seasonal conditions feel less predictable.
She has also learned that emergency management depends as much on people as plans.
“It’s not just about one person,” she says. “It takes emergency responders, community leaders, and volunteers all working together.”
That lesson became especially clear during a recent evacuation when a young community member became overwhelmed and reluctant to leave without her mother. Rather than simply enforcing the order, responders took time to help her understand what was happening and ensure she felt safe.
Compassion, Chara realized, is every bit as important as logistics.
It is also why communication plays such a central role in her work. As a host and program coordinator at the community radio station, she sees local broadcasting as a critical emergency-management tool. During future disasters, radio could provide evacuation notices, road-condition updates, and trusted local information for residents who may not have reliable internet access.
“Communication is extremely important during emergencies because people need information from people they can trust,” she says.
That understanding of both the practical and human sides of emergency management is what motivates her to continue learning.
“I hope to become an emergency management leader who leads with courage, compassion, resilience, and integrity,” she says. “I want to become someone my community can trust during difficult and uncertain times.”
As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of wildfires, floods, and other emergencies, communities like Chateh will increasingly need local leaders who understand both emergency response and the realities of remote living.
For Chara, that future is personal.
“I want to use what I learn to help protect the people, the land, and the future of Chateh,” she says.
