Essential services to continue, city says in COVID-19 update Tuesday

Leaders of Saskatoon’s emergency response teams gathered at city hall Tuesday to update where the city is at in mitigating the spread of COVID-19.

Director of Saskatoon’s emergency management, Pamela Goulden-McLeod, along with police chief Troy Cooper and fire chief Morgan Hackl delivered the address.

Goulden-McLeod told media members both in-person and over the phone, that the city’s essential services such as garbage collection and transit are continuing as scheduled. City snow clearing is also continuing as needed.

Additionally, city water treatment remains reliable and safe. Wastewater processes and Saskatoon Light & Power remain unaffected.

“Our main goal in our emergency operations centre is to continue (and) maintain those essential services for the health and wellbeing of our residents of Saskatoon, and that’s what we’ll continue to do,” Goulden-McLeod said.

City construction projects are also continuing, she said.

The city director also said she couldn’t say how many city staff members were out, either self-isolating, or sick.

Chief Cooper also addressed the changes they’re making to Saskatoon Police Service’s Headquarters. That includes shutting down the front end of the police headquarters in Saskatoon.

Cooper added that crime connected to COVID-19 hasn’t been an issue thus far.

“We have not seen an increase,” he said. “We know that often times, there are people in our community that’ll try to take advantage of a crisis.”

Chief Hackl said they have moved around some of their employees to better suit the ever-changing situation of COVID-19.

“Our fire prevention division, in terms of our fire inspections and property maintenence is prioritizing their work right now. An example of this is we have a few of those staff that are working in the E.O.C., and they’re working here at city hall, day in and day out,” he said.

“Some of our other staff are focused on assisting with other operations within the fire service outside of their division right now.”

Hackl said the community relations division is helping out with the COVID-19 response in gathering information with policies and seeing what other jurisdictions are doing.

He added they have not seen an increase in calls for service to date.

Saskatoon was home to the province’s first two positive presumptive cases of COVID-19 last Thursday and Friday. Since those two positive cases, five have come from Regina, and another in Southend.