Matty Captan shoves the barrel of a propane torch deep into a pile of snow-soaked branches, willing them to burn. It’s late December, and the occasional snowflake drifts through the mountain forest around him outside Lee Creek, in British Columbia’s North Shuswap. And while it may seem like an odd time of year to be fighting wildfires, that’s essentially what he’s doing – albeit slowly.
Mr. Captan is part of a team working on a 60-hectare wildfire fuel mitigation project above a community that understands better than most how important such measures are. In August, 2023, wildfires devastated the North Shuswap and other areas across the province, destroying hundreds of homes and huge swaths of forest. The wildfire season went down as the worst recorded in Canadian and B.C. history.
Nearly 100 years of aggressively suppressing wildfires and outlawing Indigenous cultural burns has left many Western Canadian forests unnaturally loaded with vegetation that, under the right conditions, becomes fuel for fires. That alone would be enough to seriously threaten many communities, but a warming climate has supercharged the problem. Years-long droughts, like the one preceding the 2023 fire season, dry out plants and woody debris. The number of extremely hot days increases, and when these fuel-loaded areas catch light, they burn for longer and with much higher intensity. That’s why it’s important to reduce the amount of forest material that’s available. But B.C. is woefully far behind on that front.
Rob Bouchard has an industrial wood chipper to cut the undergrowth down to size, and a map to check where the work is most needed. This area of the North Shuswap burned to devastating effect in 2023.
Fuel mitigation takes many different forms. In some instances it means thinning out the forest and selectively logging an area to remove dead, dangerous or fire-prone trees. Other times it’s setting a prescribed fire to burn away potential tinder – dried needles, leaf litter, shrubs, understory plants, fallen logs, low-hanging branches and trees themselves – before it can feed a fire. Often it means a combination of both.
When a wildfire approaching a town has to burn through a treated area, it slows down. The severity drops. The fire throws fewer embers and generates less of its own wind. Mitigation efforts won’t stop a fire in its tracks, but they can significantly improve the chances that more structures in its path will survive the blaze. “We’re not necessarily trying to reduce area burned, but we want to reduce the negative consequences of fire,” said wildfire ecologist Bob Gray. “If we can have fires that are consuming very small amounts of fuel, we don’t get those negative consequences.”
Flames draw closer to a Kelowna neighbourhood in August, 2003, a season of mass destruction that renewed experts’ interest in wildfire mitigation.Rich Lam/The Canadian Press
Mr. Gray contributed to a report led by former Manitoba premier Gary Filmon that investigated the then-precedent-setting wildfire in 2003 that destroyed hundreds of homes in Kelowna. One of the signature recommendations was the need for landscape-level wildfire fuel mitigation treatments across extensive areas of B.C. forest, and especially around the communities most at risk.
At the time, Mr. Gray, who often carries out prescribed fires in partnership with Indigenous communities and B.C. municipalities, thought that politicians would move swiftly to implement the strategy. “We didn’t think it would be that hard a thing to do, to be honest. I thought it was pretty straightforward: This is what we need to do.”
But the rapid scale-up he had hoped for never materialized through successive provincial and municipal governments. More than 20 years later, B.C. has barely scratched the surface of the work that needs to be done. A June, 2023, report by the B.C. Forest Practices Board estimated that more than 390,000 square kilometres – roughly half the province – was at high or extremely high risk of a wildfire, largely owing to excessive fuel. Another 28 per cent of the province is considered at moderate risk.
In the past six years, the Crown Land Wildfire Risk Reduction program has treated 112 square kilometres of high-risk forests around the province’s towns and cities, an average of 18.7 kilometres a year. By contrast, the state of New Jersey – which is 43 times smaller than B.C. – treated 86 square kilometres of land in 2023 alone, and that’s only counting one method: prescribed burns.
In April, 2023, Mr. Gray helped carry out a fire treatment near the Ktunaxa Nation community of Aq’am, outside Cranbrook, B.C., that was widely credited with helping save homes and protect the nearby regional airport during a wildfire later that summer. That initiative took five years to make happen, and covered an area just shy of 13 square kilometres.
Today, Mr. Captan’s task is to get rid of forest debris in an area they had worked on the winter before. Cold weather makes it less likely that burns such as these will spread.
The project Mr. Captan is working on outside Lee Creek, for Paxton Ridge Contracting, covers only 60 hectares – less than one square kilometre. Last winter they mechanically thinned the forest by chopping down some of the trees. This winter they’re focused on “limbing” the ones remaining, cutting off their lower branches and removing swaths of understory shrubs and smaller plants, either burning or wood-chipping the leftovers. It’s expected to take about two years from start to finish.
Fuel mitigation work requires careful planning: A unique prescription is written for each plot of land to be treated. It’s typically done in the late fall and early spring, when cool temperatures and high humidity make the chances of an accidental wildfire very low. The idea that hundreds of thousands of hectares across British Columbia need treating is a daunting prospect. “That’s the scale at which we need to alter vegetation if we’re going to have any impact on these large scale, high severity fires,” Mr. Gray said.
The Eaton Fire that claimed this palm tree in Altadena, Calif., on the outskirts of Los Angeles, offers firefighters a warning about what drought can do to urban areas.David Swanson/Reuters
Recent devastating wildfires in Los Angeles have underscored the importance of taking these threats seriously. The region had been without significant rain for months. When hurricane-force winds collided with communities surrounded by extremely flammable chaparral shrubs, whole neighbourhoods essentially exploded.
In the aftermath of the fire, some experts have pointed to the need to better manage potential wildfire fuels in what’s called the wildland-urban interface – areas where towns and the forest meet, including right up to people’s backyards and gardens.
It’s the same threat Mr. Gray and his colleagues have warned about in Western Canada for decades. As development nestles subdivisions deeper and deeper into wooded areas that are primed and need to burn, devastating urban wildfires are becoming more likely. It happened in Slave Lake, Alta., Fort McMurray, Alta., Jasper, Alta., and twice in Kelowna, B.C. Under the right (or wrong) conditions, it could even happen in places once thought impervious to wildfire, such as the temperate rain forest of North Vancouver or B.C.’s picturesque capital, Victoria.
Asked where he sees hope amid the smoke, Mr. Gray said he looks to Indigenous communities across western North America and their efforts to bring back both prescribed and cultural fires to their landscapes. “How do you live in a landscape full of chaparral? Well, Indigenous people did for about 15,000 years, and they found a way,” he said.
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