Campfire bans do make a difference

The arrival of hot, dry summer weather means one thing to campers — the annual campfire ban.

The fire risk in the Kamloops Forest Centre is expected to rise rapidly as temperatures climb this week.

“The fire danger rating for the Kamloops Fire District ranges from moderate to high,” Ryan Turcot, an information officer with B.C. Wildfire Services, said from his Kamloops office recently. “It can change very quickly,”

With temperatures climbing toward the 30s this week, the forest-fire watch will be underway after a period of rain. Can a campfire ban be far behind? “I don’t have a crystal ball,” Turcot said, noting that open burning is already restricted at lower elevations.

More to the point, do campfire bans actually prevent forest fires?

No one seems to know as there are no detailed statistics in B.C. on the size or locations of forest fires caused by campfires or other recreational activities, such as ATVs.

“I do think it’s fair to say that the risk of a wildfire starting from a campfire within a provincial park campsite is lower than someone camping in the back country,” Turcot said.

“Still, it does happen. Better to be safe than sorry.”

B.C. stats do show that, in the last 10 years, eight per cent of wildfires (1,277) were caused by campfires and two per cent (291) were caused by “engine/exhaust” — some of which, Turcot noted, would have been caused by ATVs. But he had no stats on the size or severity of those fires.

“There are a multitude of other factors that contribute to the size and growth of a fire,” Turcot said in an earlier email. “Looking at a correlation between fire cause and fire size in isolation will almost never paint the full picture. Just to name a few other factors (there are many more), you’d also need to look at the fire danger indices in the area at the time the fire was burning, what weather conditions were like at the time, the time of year the fire burned, how quickly it was reported, the number and types of resources that responded to it, etc.”

Alberta, on the other hand, provides much more detailed statistics and posts them online. Its most recent data covers 18 years from 1996 to 2014.

It showed that 15 per cent of wildfires (3,722) were caused by campfires, but that accounted for only .01 per cent of the area burned (341 hectares).

This compares to ATVs that triggered 1.3 per cent (321) of the fires but burned .08 per cent of the land (2,731 hectares).

To put that in perspective, 97 per cent of the fires caused by campfires were less than 100 square metres – or less than the land occupied by a single-family house.

By contrast, the average size of a fire caused by an ATV was almost 10 times that size.

Yet, 2017 was the first time off-road vehicles were restricted in B.C.

In a province where forestry is such a huge part of the economy and forest fires are rampant (an average of almost 1,700 fires per year in the past 10 years burning an average of more than 150,000 hectares per year) the scarcity of detailed statistics is surprising.

B.C. breaks down forest fires causes into seven to nine categories, depending on which database is viewed.

The Alberta stats, on the other hand, list more than 50 classifications.

B.C., for example, has one category called “recreation.”

In Alberta, there are a dozen that could be classified as recreation, including: campers, ATV users, hikers, hunters, boats/canoe/kayak and picnickers. It even has classifications for grudges (35 fires burning 47 hectares) and personal gain (22 fires burning 162 hectares).

In explaining the paucity of detailed information in B.C, Turcot simply went back to his point about there being many factors contributing to the severity of such fires and stressed the efforts B.C. Wildfire Service puts into educating the public to reduce fire hazards.

So, expect a campfire ban to be announced soon. After all, they may do some good.

“We do know that, when we institute a fire ban, it reduces the ‘likelihood’ of human-caused wildfires,” Renato Gandia, press secretary for the Office of the Minister of Agriculture and Forestry in Alberta, said in an email.

“An example is the 2017 fire season – Alberta experienced very few humancaused wildfires in the southern portion of the province over a six-week period of fire restrictions and bans, compared to a neighbouring province with similar wildfire hazard during the same period of time.”