Unlike most people in Tumbler Ridge, I had the great pleasure of being evacuated for a second time, due to the Bearhole Lake fire.
I was around in 2006 for the Hourglass Fire, when the entire community of Tumbler Ridge had to leave as that fire threatened to cut off Highways 29 and 52, while another fire had cut of Highway 52 South. This would have left people in the community completely isolated.
This time, there was only a handful of us who had to leave Boot Lake, as the Area Restriction order was established around the Bearhole Lake fire. It was not a panicked evacuation, with the fire pointing past Bearhole Lake. Indeed, from the campsite you couldn’t tell that there was a fire burning 20 km away, as the wind pushed the smoke from the fire past the campground well to the south, leaving a perfect labour day weekend.
Indeed, if we hadn’t had to return to town on Sunday for a few hours, we might have chosen to stay out at the lake. Nobody came to tell us to leave, and, if I hadn’t been checking the fire status to keep you folks up to date, I might not have even known.
But we did know, and worried that they might not let us back into the area if we left. So, we loaded up the trailer and left Sunday morning. There was, of course, no barriers, no people watching the road. Instead, they were watching Highway 52, as the fire threatened to spill across it and on towards Kelly Lake, which also was evacuated.
Having left, we decided to spend the last day of the long weekend at Moose Lake instead, where it was dusty and windy, but under no threat of fire.
The Bearhole Lake fire this year is an interesting contrast to last year’s fires.
For instance, last year, the Tentfire Creek sparked up on June 30, and spent most of the summer working its way slowly towards Tumbler Ridge.
Area restrictions for that fire were finally lifted at the end of August.
At the same time, a fire burned in the Bearhole Lake area, making a run similar to the one seen recently on this year’s Bearhole Lake fire, back on August 14 and 15, 2021.
This year, the only fire of interest was the Hasler Flats fire, which started August 8.
Then, slowly, more and more fires started around the region, including the massive Battleship Mountain fire southwest of Hudson’s Hope, which started August 30 and has now forced the evacuation of the town.
That fire has grown to 24,284 ha, or four times the size of the Bearhole Lake fire.
Still, it is less than a third the size of the largest fire that burned last year, the 95,980 ha Sparks Lake fire near Kamloops.
Forest fires are a part of the landscape in BC, but over the last five years, they have been getting worse.
It was less than 200 years ago that indigenous people in the area—before there was a BC—would do prescribed burns, intentionally setting controlled fires during low-risk times of the year.
This would thin out the forest, toughen up the trees that survived and allow new plants to grow.
But when settlers came, they put an end to the practice, thinking they were protecting the forest. But as we logged it, replanted it with conifers, and left the detritus of our passing, we created a tinderbox, 100 years in the making.
We as people are getting better at preventing fires—we have taken Smokey the Bear’s words to heart, and the number of human-caused firest had dropped from about 50 percent in BC to 35 percent last year.
That’s good. But as the planet warms up, dries out, the number of fires caused by lighting strikes have increased. During last summer’s heat wave, more than 710,000 lightning strikes were recorded in BC and the Rocky Mountains.
The average? 8,300 over the same time period.
In the last 50 years, the amount of forest lost to fire across the country has climbed from just over one million hectares to 2.5 million hectares.
There are lots of moving parts, from climate change to forestry management practices over the last century to micro climates and prioritizing which fires get which resources, as the cost of fighting these fires exceeds more than half a billion dollars annually, and that’s just here in BC.
Over the last 100 years, we as a society have made lots of mistakes when dealing with fires. With forestry. And most people think there should be a change. But what is that change? Ask one person and they’ll tell you to cut down all the trees. Ask another, it is to let nature take its course.
But the idea that keeps filtering to the top is prescribed burns.
There is a budget for thinning out the forest, doing these controlled burns. But with the cost of fighting major fires growing, it’s easier to move funds dedicated to long term mitigation efforts into short term solutions. And let’s be honest, when the Tentfire Creek fire was sitting on the hills above Tumbler Ridge, ready to pounce, I bet we all were happy that the resources had been put into controlling that specific fire and not into controlled burns elsewhere.
There are other things we can do, but they aren’t popular. Timber standing within 75 metres of a house is the leading cause of forest fires becoming interface fires and burning down structures, including house. But when I look out of my window at the trees in the park behind (and beside) my house, I wonder if that is too high a cost. Cut down the trees on the off chance there might be a fire, or leave them be, and, if there is a fire, run the chance of having the house burn.
But we as a society need to figure this out, and quickly, before all that we love about living here goes up in smoke.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
