WILDFIRE MITIGATION WORK COST BORNE BY MUNICIPALITIES
Thinning timber, underbrush, removing forest-floor debris effective measures
On a cool mid-March day, Garnet Mierau stood in the forest at the north edge of the town of Logan Lake in the B.C. Interior.
He stood on a boundary of sorts.
On one side, the ground and standing trees are badly burned, some like blackened match sticks.
On the other, the forest is burned but more lightly. The bark on trees, many Douglas fir with thick bark naturally adapted to fire, have been scorched but only waist high.
On the forest floor, much of the soil and its covering, carrying seeds, remains intact.
The less-damaged area has been worked on before the fire to reduce the intensity and spread of wildfire: thinning timber, cutting underbrush and the lower limbs of trees, and removing woody debris from the forest floor. It is designed to keep fire on the ground, away from the upper reaches of the tree canopy where it can spread rapidly.
The treatment is credited with helping keep Logan Lake from being overwhelmed by a raging wildfire last summer.
“It absolutely worked — 100 per cent worked,” says Mierau, a professional forester who helps manage a community forest in a doughnut-shaped area around town.
Logan Lake has done the work by piecing together provincial and federal grants, and taking advantage of the fact the town of 2,000 has a community forest, a form of Crown land tenure that provides local responsibility for the surrounding forest and also much-needed revenue from timber to offset costs of reducing wildfire risk.
Logan Lake represents a best-case scenario for B.C. communities, but it is an anomaly.
Government efforts, so far, have fallen short of what is needed for communities to properly prepare for expected increased frequency of wildfire and floods from climate change.
Most communities struggle to piece together projects to reduce wildfire risk, through lack of money, uncertain access to provincial grants, bureaucratic obstacles and lack of authority and influence on provincial and private land.
A four-month Postmedia investigation found in two decades less than 10 per cent of needed work has been completed on more than 11,000 square kilometres of forested land identified by the province as needing wildfire risk reduction in and around communities.
The cost to do all the work could be as much as $6 billion.
But provincial spending on prevention is overshadowed by money spent on fighting fires: $4.16 billion on firefighting compared to $224 million on prevention since 2008.
“The bottom line is we needed to start spending money — a lot more money — 20 years ago,” says Bruce Blackwell, a forestry consultant who has put together hundreds of community wildfire protection plans.
“And if we don't ramp this up, there's still a lot of potential for this to get worse,” said Blackwell, who contributed to the B.C. government-commissioned review Firestorm 2003 that launched the province's approach to community wildfire risk reduction.
Postmedia's examination is based on responses from questions put to more than 85 municipalities, First Nations and regional districts, thousands of pages of government and community documents and independent reports, and dozens of interviews.
Underpinning the findings is the fact that local governments, which the province had made responsible for much of the risk reduction work, face huge costs they cannot pay.
Postmedia found that in B.C., some communities have no wildfire protection plans. And such plans are required to receive grant funding from the province. Those include Grand Forks, Greenwood, Trail, Creston and Salmo. Those communities point to their regional districts as having responsibility.
“We are surrounded by agricultural land and large forests but have no control over how these properties address fire management,” says Anne Williams, Salmo's chief administrative officer.
Other communities have just put in place wildfire protection plans and have yet to seriously start work, including Fort St. James, Fraser Lake and Houston in Northern B.C.
Communities in southwestern B.C. — including Port Moody, Mission and West Vancouver — are coming to terms with the growing risk of fire even in wetter climates. As one expert put it, after last year's heat dome in B.C. when temperatures soared to the 40 C level, “all bets are off” on what can burn on the coast.
BURNED HOMES, DISPLACED PEOPLE
Last year, fire swept the province, one of the worst seasons on record.
Nearly 530 buildings burned, including primary residences, seasonal homes and commercial buildings, more than in any recent extreme wildfire years, according to figures provided by Emergency Management B.C.
The town of Lytton was destroyed. Two people died there.
The small communities of Monte Lake and Killiney Beach — and also the Okanagan Indian Band — had dozens of houses burned to the ground.
Wayne Carson, a former fire chief for the northwest side of Okanagan Lake who lives in Killiney Beach, had to evacuate his waterfront home in August with fire threatening the community.
One of his neighbours, who had stayed behind, reached Carson at a hotel on his cellphone at 2 a.m. and told him: “I am watching my place burn. Your place is next.”
But Carson ended up being one of the lucky ones. More than 100 buildings in the area went up in flames, but not his.
Standing on the shore of the lake in mid-March, he surveyed the path of the fire that came down a steep, treed embankment.
If it had got into a treed area northwest of his neighbour's house — a thick tangle of underbrush, for which thinning and other work could reduce wildfire risk — it would have burned his home and others, says Carson.
As a former fire chief, and now an elected director for the Regional District of Central Okanagan, Carson would like wildfire risk reduced in the forested land in and surrounding the communities along the northwest shore of the lake. He also wants backup power systems installed to ensure water flows during wildfires so that people can set up a system of sprinklers to protect their homes.
A similar system exists in Logan Lake.
“If government ever had an opportunity, it is now,” said Carson. “There's a wide recognition that global warming is here and that fire is having an effect on us. It has burned homes and displaced people.”
The residents on the northwest shore of the lake rely on the regional district's wildfire protection plan, produced more than a decade ago.
The plan includes maps that highlight priority areas where forests should be thinned to create large fuel breaks meant to reduce the spread and intensity of wildfire along the mountain ridges above communities such as Killiney Beach.
The highlighted priority areas are extensive, as much as 200 square kilometres, according to an estimate by Postmedia.
Much smaller strips of priority areas were also identified in Killiney Beach.
There has been some work on reducing wildfire fuel, but it's a fraction of the highlighted area and none in Killiney Beach.
In response to Postmedia questions, regional district officials noted wildfire-risk reduction has been carried out in regional parks, and it shares information from the plan with the province, forestry companies, private property owners and others.
“Each party is responsible for treatment on their own property,” district spokeswoman Jodie Foster said in a written response. “The (community wildfire protection plan) has been publicly available on the rdco.com website since its release and is once again on our new website.”
The regional district noted the mapped priority areas were on Crown land, tree farm licences and private property.
According to a response from B.C. Wildfire Service officials, just over one square kilometre of forest thinning has taken place near Killiney Beach, and about a quarter of that on Okanagan Indian Band land.
Wildfire Service officials said the fuel break areas in the plan are identified as proposed priorities and are not a specified work area.
“More areas are planned for treatment ... on the westside (of Okanagan Lake) over the next few years with a new treatment starting this (March) valued at $259,200,” provincial fire information officer Jean Strong said in a statement.
FIGHTING FOR THE SAME SMALL POT OF MONEY
One of the problems B.C. must confront is that wildfire — part of the natural ecosystem, particularly in B.C.'s dry southern Interior forests — was removed in the past century as fires were seen as something that needed to be put out.
First Nations were also prevented from using fire to protect their lands from more intense fire starting in the late 19th century.
It has created large areas of mature, thick forests full of fuel for wildfires, say scientists.
The increased wildfire risk and potential for more frequent, larger fires is exacerbated by warming temperatures.
It's why a paradigm shift is needed, one where forests are managed for resilience on a much larger scale and not just mainly for their commercial timber value, says Lori Daniels, a University of B.C. forestry professor with expertise in wildfire.
It also means targeting priority areas rather than relying on ad hoc grants that do not target priorities, tackling much larger areas for wildfire fuel reduction, the return of more intentionally set fires (called prescribed burns) and increased funding to do this work, say experts.
And it means finding a way to better help homeowners and larger private landowners reduce risks on their properties, a key issue highlighted in many community wildfire protection plans.
It also means not putting the burden on communities that don't have the ability to raise large amounts of new revenue through property taxes or the capacity or the expertise to direct wildfire risk reduction, say experts.
Daniels noted there are more than 350 communities, First Nations and regional districts in B.C. trying to figure out if they have a wildfire problem, each trying to figure out what the solution might be, each trying to come up with a prevention plan, each fighting for the same small pot of money.
“We've set ourselves up for a total lose-lose situation,” she said.
In eastern Washington state, many of the elements that B.C. experts are talking about are already happening.
In 2016, the state adopted a 20-year forest health plan with a target of reducing fuel on 5,000 square kilometres by 2037 to reduce wildfire spread and fire intensity.
The plan was supported with funding and increased state staff to manage it — and requires public reporting of results. The state has reached 30 per cent of its goal, including with prescribed burns, an annual pace that is an order of magnitude greater than in B.C.
In contrast, B.C. has no long-term documented plan or targets and does not provide detailed, public reporting.
“This problem is so big, it needs a very strategic and very focused plan to be successful,” said Blackwell, the forestry consultant.
“And unfortunately, the scope and scale, I think just overwhelms the people that are tasked with trying to solve it.”
`DUPLICATE THIS ACROSS THE PROVINCE'
Garnet Mierau, the forester, is quick to point out reducing fuel loads did not save Logan Lake alone — credit must go to the work of firefighters — but the fuel-thinning did make a significant contribution.
B.C. Premier John Horgan and Forests Minister Katrine Conroy recognized that contribution when they visited the community shortly after the fire was stopped at the edge of the community.
Horgan thanked the community for their long-running work to build up wildfire protection.
“It's very powerful to see firsthand,” said Horgan
Added Conroy: “We want to make sure that we are duplicating this across the province — and that it's happening quickly.”
After a tour that included a view of a ridge where more forest thinning will take place, Mierau reflected on the fact it has taken Logan Lake, which has the benefit of a community forest, nearly 20 years to create a 500-metre-thick protective ring.
Following repeated extreme wildfire seasons, Mierau said he hopes there has been a recognition of the colossal scale of the work needed and what it will cost.
“I am optimistic,” he said, noting the premier's visit to Logan Lake. “But we need to take action now. It's a crisis. You just can't sit around talking about it.”
We need to take action now. It's a crisis. You just can't sit around talking about it.