While much of BC—as well as other parts of Canada—are currently dealing with active forest fires, Tumbler Ridge is working through the fallout of the West Kiskatinaw Fire earlier this year.
Although there was remarkably little damage to any infrastructure, what happens when your infrastructure is the forest itself?
Tumbler Ridge Community Forester Duncan McKellar made a presentation to council, outlining what happened during the fire, as well as steps taken to mitigate fire activity around the community.
He began with a history of fire mitigation around Tumbler Ridge.
“As far as I know, wildfire mitigation started around 2006 when they did a wildfire protection plan at that time,” says McKellar. “Between 2007 to 2012 or so, they treated those areas that were under the guise of that Community Wildfire Protection Plan. So there were some small areas that were harvested and cut around the town. When the Community Forest got started around 2011 or 2012, that was when there was a big area logged right beside the Trend Hotel and the community was not happy with that.”
He says the prescription for that area was to harvest all the pine, but the entire area was pine so it got clear cut. It created an outcry in town and subsequently the project got terminated.
With the Community Forest just starting up, they were tasked to take over the prescription areas that hadn’t been completed, most notably around the kettle pond near the Visitor Information Centre.”
As part of that, says McKellar, the Community Forest did extensive consultation with the town and with council. “It was important we did this one right.” That was in 2014. The Community Forest suggested building trails in the area, possibly for mountain bikes, possibly for skiing. That trail was built a few years ago. “The District decided to do a nice interpretive trail there and it looks excellent. That was a win for everybody.”
As that was wrapping up, the Community Forest hired a company out of Smithers to look at the town and update the Wildfire Protection Plan. “We did three areas, one on the golf course road, around 26 hectares, a larger one north of town in the horse stable area, and then the one east of town behind the light industrial site. Once those were completed, we asked the wildfire experts to come and have a look and see what we had accomplished, and if there was any other areas that’s needed to be treated.”
He says there were still some areas—mostly around the golf course—that could have been done, but the public didn’t want to see the golf course get completely harvested. “That makes perfect sense. And the wildfire branch didn’t want us to harvest on the steep bank of the river by the golf course. They said that wouldn’t really reduce fire, even though it’s a high hazard there. If a fire happens to come from the west and jumps the river, it’ll scoot up that steep hillside by the golf course and it’ll just go right over the golf course and on. So they said we shouldn’t treat that area, because it’s very steep and very visually apparent.”
He said the town is in pretty good shape, at least, in what it can do without cutting down all the trees within ten kilometres. “We pretty much completed what we thought was some protection to mitigate wildfire damage. Now, of course, it’s not going to stop a wildfire from coming into town. Experts are saying that wildfires are now spotting up to eight kilometres. Ashes are coming five miles or eight kilometres ahead of the wall of fire. Even if you clear cut all the way around Tumbler Ridge, you’re not really going to prevent the hot ash from coming in and lighting a home on fire.”
But, he says, it does provide a barrier. “It’ll slow the fire down and provide folks time to action those fires and minimize any damage around the community.”
In 2021, he says, the government sent out people to do some more prescriptions. “There are three or four areas around Tumbler Ridge that they focused some suggested prescriptions on to treat. Last year we went in with wildfire people from Prince George, and tromped through these sites and determined that—even though the government went ahead and did this all on their own—they weren’t really going to minimize fire. The ones that are going up the east side of town, for example, are on the steep hill. There’s new bike trails that are being built there, and fire doesn’t go downhill as fast as uphill. And it’s very scenic there, too. It didn’t seem that a fire treatment would reduce the fire risk substantially on those areas.”
He says in his view, it was a political prescription plan, and that the town is in pretty good shape if a fire were to get close to the community. The town will need to look at prescriptions again in five or ten years, once the trees have a chance to grow, he says.
The West Kiskatinaw did get close to the community, coming to withing five kilometres of town. And a part of the land it burned was set aside for the Community Forest, about 2300 ha.
The fire burnt two of the Community Forest’s three plantations that were planted some years ago. “Two were pretty much completely destroyed,” says McKellar. “The third one was 20 percent burnt.”
He says the plan is to replant those next spring. “We have some trees ready to go and we don’t have to pay for that, but we do have to do some administration around getting the trees back.”
He and some other members of the Community Forest went out in helicopters to see if there were some stands that were still saleable. “It turns out it burned so hot, you wouldn’t be able to sell it if you could,” he says. “And most of the fire went through younger stands or small diameter stands, even though they might have been 15 to 18 metres tall. It just burned them so hot that you couldn’t sell them. We don’t see any salvage opportunities in the burn there.”
He says over the next few years, they will probably have to do a re-inventory to re-evaluate what areas will and won’t be cut. “We have to see how that impacts our fiber flow in the long run, but that’s just something we will manage in the next few years.”
He says most of the areas other than the plantations will probably be left to naturally regenerate, as fire causes the pine cones to germinate. “If you drive up north [to the Quality Lake fire area], you can see all the young trees that came up underneath that fire. We anticipate a lot of that to happen, because it was mainly pine stands that burned. They’ll mostly be left alone.”
He says, moving forward, the town doesn’t need to cut more trees down, but it might want to look at ways to provide access to water. “I know there’s rivers there for the helicopters to put their buckets in, but are they always deep enough? I don’t know. There might be some places where you can do some reconnaissance and say, okay, this place in the river, maybe we can make a little deeper area that would be close to town that machines could get to.”
He says the community might want to look at ways to deal with fires locally. “It’s difficult because the government doesn’t want us to do that. They want to control it from the provincial level. I get why they do that, because they can control lots of equipment and lots of assets. But for some small communities, what are you going to do? I work with another small community, and they have water pumps there that were bought. They’re ready to go, and there are community members trained on how to use them.”
The province offers a two day, 16 hour training course for forest industry workers and contract fire fighters, primarily, and needs to be refreshed annually.
Fire Chief Dustin Curry says the Fire Department does have that basic training, as well as the s-115 course to do the sprinkler setup that was in place during the West Kiskatinaw Fire. “The District is actually undertaking a Community Wildfire Risk Reduction plan as part of our capital projects this year through UBCM,” says Curry. “A lot of that is going to involve input from the Chief Fire Prevention Officer from the Prince George Fire Branch, so they’ll be up here. Understandably they’re busy right now but as soon as they get some time they’re going to be up in our area doing a lot of the groundwork that you were just alluding to, and looking at what we can do for our own resiliency so that Tumbler Ridge is better prepared for future events.”
For more info on the Tumbler Ridge Community Forest, visit www.tumblerridgeforest.com
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.