Image Credit: Contributed / Ali Giddens

By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: The wildfire beast may be coming to the street where you live

Jul 3, 2021 | 6:30 AM

A MOST UNWELCOME GUEST is coming to town, and its name is Wildfire.

A few hours before his community was leveled this week, Lytton Mayor Jan Polderman was talking to local media about the heat wave, noting that residents would be giving their air conditioners a good workout in the coming days.

He had no way of knowing a raging wildfire would seemingly come out of nowhere and sweep through the community, destroying 90 per cent of its businesses and homes. A thousand people had to flee for their lives Wednesday night, many with nothing but the vehicles they drove away in.

I don’t know Polderman well but he strikes me as a low-key straight shooter, the kind of guy you’d want in charge during an emergency. A lot of cool heads are needed right now.

Thursday night brought the close call in Juniper and Valleyview. Residents from a large number of properties had to evacuate as flames came within yards of several homes before crews turned them back. Yesterday, flare-ups continued but were kept under control with constant effort.

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More towns will likely be threatened before the season is over. Hotter summer temperatures are attributed to climate change, which causes wildfires to flare up more quickly, burn hotter and spread faster. Towns and cities that get in the way provide a smorgasbord of fuel.

In recent years we’ve had examples in Kelowna, Barriere, Williams Lake and Fort McMurray. When wildfires make it into towns, the costs of recovery are astronomical. Five years after the Fort McMurray fire, 60,000 insurance claims later, the town still hasn’t been fully rebuilt.

All over the B.C. Interior, fires seem to be springing up by the minute. They’re all part of what was identified in a report after the 2017 fire season as “the new normal.”

I remember, as a kid, one summer in the South Okanagan when the temperature in Osoyoos — one of the hottest towns in the country along with Lytton — hit 111 Fahrenheit (that was before Pierre Trudeau and Len Marchand switched us over to metric). That was a record at the time, a one-time occurrence.

This week, the temperature in Osoyoos reached the equivalent of 116F under the heat dome; in Lytton it hit 120F.

Firefighting costs will, once again, reach millions of dollars. Last year, considered a relatively quiet one for wildfires, the cost in B.C. topped $200 million. The amount of ground torched by wildfires now routinely exceeds a million hectares. Hundreds of structures are lost each year.

The Abbott-Chapman report of 2018 included 108 recommendations from Chief Maureen Chapman and former cabinet minister George Abbott on ways to improve our response to wildfires.

The report pointed to “growing challenges with respect to heat, drought, lightning and intense rains intersecting with snow melt, underlining the imperative for government to respond in new, different or better ways.”

Despite improvements in training and firefighting methods, the frequency and intensity of fires will continue to increase, but we have it within our means to cut them in half.

On June 30, for example, 16 new fires were started in B.C. by lightning. Thirty-three more were human caused. The fire that destroyed Lytton may have been caused by sparks from a passing train. That’s under investigation, but the danger of sparks from trains has long been known, and railroads try to take measures to mitigate.

Typically, over time, humans cause almost as many wildfires as lightning, and they make the season longer than it would otherwise be.

Illegal campfires, discarded cigarette butts, careless use of equipment, and arson are some of the creative ways we start fires.

Government aggressively prosecutes people who cause wildfires, handing out fines from a few thousand to several hundred thousand dollars.

It will never be possible, though, to recover all the costs of human-caused wildfires from those who cause them, and no amount of money can bring back the lost homes, businesses and lives.

We can’t stop lightning from starting fires like the ones in Juniper-Valleyview but we could cut wildfire losses in half if we all took personal responsibility to stop them from happening.

That might mean bringing back Smokey the Bear, expanding the existing FireSmart program, improving risk management, building homes that are more fire resistant and maybe even limiting development in areas most prone to interface fires.

In the meantime, urban residents will have to be as vigilant as their country cousins against the dreaded notice to evacuate.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and a retired newspaper editor. He is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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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.