File Photo (Image Credit: Province of B.C.)

By Thomas Martin

Sound Off

SOUND OFF: The common goal of wildfire protection

Jul 4, 2022 | 4:36 PM

MLA ROLY RUSSELL RECENTLY WROTE A SOUND OFF entitled “Reducing wildfire risk”. This is a common goal supported by the majority of British Columbians. I agree this government has taken good steps by investing in wildfire initiatives. However, I disagree that these actions alone will be enough. I also disagree with the government’s approach in measuring results in dollars spent rather than actual results.

Let’s start with the move to full-time, year-round wildfire firefighters. This is a good move – it could result in more experienced firefighters staying on the fireline rather than moving into an office. However, this government promotes it as a move to proactive wildfire management. It’s not. Proactive wildfire management involves many things – modified response to wildfires, thinning of forests and prescribed burning. This was detailed in the Wildfire Service’s 2010 Wildland Fire Management Strategy. Employing year-round firefighters isn’t proactive management; it’s a move to year-round firefighters.

The majority of press releases from this government focus on dollars, not results. Yes, budget commitments are needed and should be encouraged. However, results matter. What we primarily care about are impacts to people. How many lives were lost? How many homes burned to the ground? People evacuated? Not to mention the post-wildfire impacts of flooding, debris flows, timber harvest reductions and ecological impacts.

These impacts are harder to measure. It’s also challenging as climate change will make future seasons worse – likely worse than 2017, 2018 or 2021. And there’s an element of chance. A wildfire may burn where people live or it may not. Our actions will make a difference, but it’s hard to measure exactly how much. These factors make it challenging to measure how much impact our actions have on people’s lives.

We could measure other indicators to judge our results. We could measure the annual area treated by wildfire risk reduction projects or annual area of prescribed fires or average years of experience of our firefighters. However, these numbers are not publicly reported, making it extremely difficult for the public — and professionals like myself — to assess our results. Our government could choose to measure and report on these indicators but instead focuses on dollars spent without mentioning results.

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As mentioned earlier – reducing wildfires is a common goal. A recent white paper authored by wildfire scientists and practitioners emphasized the need to involve all levels of government and communities. However, in our province 94 per cent of land is public under the jurisdiction of the provincial government. The province not only should be leaders in our common goal, but they must be leaders.

So what changes could be made? I’m glad you asked.

1. Increase prescribed burning – especially Indigenous-led cultural burning. A large piece of our problem today is our government not only forcibly removed Indigenous people from their land, but stopped the practice of intentionally lighting low-severity fires. These fires would clear out small fuels and trees and make an area less susceptible to high-severity wildfires. This government has signalled a shift toward more prescribed burning. However, many administrative roadblocks to these projects have remained untouched. Namely – a lengthy approval process and lack of liability insurance for municipality-led projects. Other jurisdictions are years ahead of B.C. Florida, where prescribed burning is so common elementary schools join for field trips, conducts 850,000 hectares of planned burns annually.
2. Manage our entire landscape for wildfire risk – not just the forests around our communities. Our current strategy only focuses on the forests directly adjacent to communities. This directly contradicts what leading scientists and common sense tell us: focus on the forests around our communities and our entire landscape. In 2021, Monte Lake lost many homes to wildfire. This fire started more than 35 kilometers from the community and travelled through high-density conifer forests before reaching the community. The reality is decades of practices by my industry resulted in high density and highly flammable conifer-dominated stands across our landscape.
3. Improve the relationship between the B.C. Wildfire Service and the forest industry. My industry plays a large role in wildfire response. However, it’s an as-and-when relationship with little investment in the off-season. By my count, the Wildfire Service has 43 staff working full-time in aviation, 27 staff in communications, and zero working with the forestry industry. Similarly, the Wildfire Service provides fireline certifications for their own staff and cross-training opportunities with municipal fire departments. However, these certifications and cross-training opportunities do not extend to the forest industry.
4. Mechanize our fuel treatments. The Kamloops Forest District alone has 130,000 hectares of high- and extreme-risk forests immediately adjacent to homes. At market rates, this would cost around $975 million to treat by hand. Thankfully, European forestry has spent decades developing machinery specialized in this kind of work – small, low impact machines designed to remove some of the trees from the forest and leave others standing. These machines not only reduce the treatment costs, but allow the sale of small trees removed from the forest. Some may think I’m arguing to increase logging in response to our wildfire situation. I’m not. I’m arguing that the scale of the problem requires us to use the most effective method to perform this work – projects targeting the smallest trees in a stand and leaving behind the largest and oldest.
5. FireSmart private properties. The inconvenient truth is, in a catastrophic scenario such as the Lytton fire, homes, not trees, become the source of fuel and the fire moves from home to home and completely overwhelms emergency response. Currently, FireSmarting your home is voluntary – but individual towns may impose limited development permit areas requiring new construction be built to a FireSmart standard. B.C. could change the provincial building code to include FireSmart standards for all homes. Or we could require rural property owners to take responsibility for the fire risk on their land – as El Dorado County has done.

Thomas Martin is a wildfire consultant with over a decade of working in wildfire and forestry.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.