With help from the Forest Enhancement Society of BC, the Logan Lake Community Forest will be able to do more fire mitigation work (Image Credit: CFJC Today)

By Chad Klassen

FIRESMART FUNDING

Logan Lake hoping to step up fire mitigation efforts with funding from Forest Enhancement Society of BC

Sep 23, 2021 | 1:53 PM

KAMLOOPS — It’s been well-documented this summer how FireSmart iniatives in Logan Lake helped save the community from the raging Tremont Creek wildfire.

Logan Lake was Canada’s first FireSmart community in 2013. However, such efforts have been going on since 2003.

“We like to say it’s an 18-year process to be an overnight success,” said Garnet Mierau from the Logan Lake Community Forest, which owns and operates the forests around the community. “We’ve always been preparing for a wildfire event, and we’d hoped it would never come, and it has. I think what we’re quite proud of is the fact that all the work we did in advance worked.”

Looking into the Logan Lake Community Forest, just metres from town, it’s clear where the mitigation work happened and where it didn’t.

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During a backburn by the B.C. Wildfire Service, the fire never climbed the trees where limbs and branches were cut off three metres up, but the fire torched the untreated areas.

“What you want to influence is wildfire behavior,” said Mierau. “You want to move it from the crown where it hops from treetop to treetop, and you want to drop it to the ground so that it just falls along the ground and it’s safe to go and fight.”

Logan Lake has received government grants to conduct mitigation. Crews collect branches and other scraps, which are either burned or used for fibre. Fibre recovery is important to the Forest Enhancement Society of BC, which has provided funding to Logan Lake, including a couple hundred thousand dollars for two new projects.

“When the communities do these treatments and it results in woody fibre, biomass, we like to see projects where that biomass is used to create green energy for British Columbians or even exporting around the world in the form of pellets, or in the case of electricity it can be sold to Alberta and other provinces,” said Steve Kozuki from the Forest Enhancement Society of BC.

With more funding, Logan Lake is looking at stepping up mitigation efforts using equipment in addition to labour on the ground.

“You can only find so many people to do the work and you can only get so much done in a year,” said Mierau. “The challenge in front of us is that there’s so much more to do and with the fire seasons that we’re seeing now, we need to be thinking at a landscape level and all communities should be thinking at a landscape level because that’s the kind of fires that are going to hit us.”