Fire-proofing West Kelowna forests
A plan to fire-proof forests in West Kelowna carries a $1.4 million price tag.
Sixty-two sites - on a mix of city-, regionaland Crown-owned land - should be the focus of fire mitigation work, a new report states. Collectively, the lands encompass nearly 200 has.
“The number one highest hazard is the east side of Mount Boucherie in an area known as Eain Lamont park,” reads part of a report going to council on Tuesday.
It costs an average of $7,500 to undertake fire mitigation work on one hectare of land.
The work typically involves thinning out trees, clearing undergrowth, and removing lower limbs so grass and brush fires that do start are less likely to spread into trees.
For the first time, some public money is available to help private landowners undertake fire mitigation work on their own property. That’s said to be an important development given the risk that fires on private land can pose to the community.
“Even if most homes in a residential area undertake meaningful FireSmart actions, when unmitigated private properties are interspersed among them, the overall threat to mitigated property remains, due to the threat of structure ignition and propagation,” the report to council states.
A new feature of the Community Resiliency Program offers rebates to homeowners on private land who engage in fire mitigation activities. The rebate can be no more than 50 per cent of the total value of work undertaken, and is capped at $500 per property.
The number of wildfires in the West Kelowna area has “shown a steady decline over the past few decades”, the report to council says, but the total amount of land that’s burned each year is on the rise.
“In other words, fewer wildfires are occurring (on the Westside), but those that do occur are generally burning more area,” the report says.
Considerable work to thin out forests has already been done in and around West Kelowna. Some forested areas near the Glenrosa, Rose Valley, and Smith Creek neighbourhoods now have only one-third as many trees as they once did because of fire mitigation efforts, city council heard last year.
“We’ve reduced the density of the stands from 1,100 trees per hectare to 350,” Dave Gill of Ntityix Resources, a forestry management company owned by the Westbank First Nation, told city council in August 2017.
“By no means is that going to stop a wildfire, but it should slow a wildfire down, and enable a crew to get in there and fight it on the ground,” Gill said.