Community centres prepares for emergencies

When disaster strikes, local arenas and recreation centres often become the most important buildings in a community, serving as evacuation centres, warming or cooling centres, or information hubs.

The Ontario Recreation Facilities Association (ORFA) is welcoming leaders from Ontario’s recreation sector to ORFA Symposium 2026 on October 26 and 27 in Markham to start the conversation about the vital role of recreation facilities in emergency management planning.

ORFA wants governments and communities to understand that investing in recreation infrastructure is also an investment in keeping people safe when disasters happen. These buildings, and the people who run them, often become essential services during a crisis.

As extreme weather events, including wildfires and flooding, become more common, many communities have firsthand experience in repurposing recreation infrastructure in an emergency:

In summer 2026, many recreation facilities, such as Fort William Gardens in Thunder Bay and Mountjoy Arena in Timmins, were set up as evacuation centres for people fleeing and returning home from wildfires across Northern Ontario.

Hundreds of local residents sheltered in Markham community centres during a severe ice storm in 2013, which left thousands without power; some families faced outages for multiple days.

ORFA intends to ensure each community has a building large enough to hold hundreds of people and is ready to host evacuees.

Much of Ontario’s recreation infrastructure was not built with emergency management in mind. It is also aging with many facilities built more than 50 years ago and lacking amenities needed in an emergency. Can the facility keep the lights and heat on during a multi-day power outage? Can it provide safe indoor air during wildfire smoke or extreme heat? Are entrances and washrooms accessible? Is there a place to charge phones? Are there showers, toilets and places to prepare and refrigerate good? Are staff trained to convert an arena into an evacuation centre? These are critical questions for governments and communities to evaluate.

At ORFA’s Symposium 2026, Ontario’s recreation leaders will participate in education sessions that will help them answer these questions in their own communities. Session topics include extreme weather response, community event safety, digital risks of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, retrofitting community facilities for emergency response, post-pandemic lessons learned and more.