West Kelowna council considers cost of wildfire prevention
KELOWNA A plan to fireproof forests in West Kelowna carries a price tag of $1.4 million.
Sixty-two sites on a mix of city, regional and Crown-owned land should be the focus of fire mitigation work, a new report states. Collectively, the lands encompass nearly 200 hectares.
“The No. 1 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.
The report says, “fewer wildfires are occurring (on the Westside), but those that do occur are generally burning more area.”
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.
“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,” Dave Gill of Ntityix Resources, a forestry management company owned by the Westbank First Nation, told city council in August 2017.