Last issue (a mere two weeks ago, if anyone forgot about it) we were talking about the arctic front that blew through town, sending temperatures into the -40 range.
As I write this, the temperature is +15, 55 degrees from the coldest week of winter.
And that is, apparently, what winter was. A week.
While the weather is expected to get down to -15 for the weekend, the chance of getting much colder than that is slim.
By the way, +15 is—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—the hottest January 29 on record.
That was a common refrain around these parts last year. The hottest spring on record. The hottest fall on record. The hottest October on record.
Last year was the worst year for wildfires on record and BC Wildfire isn’t quite convinced that the West Kiskatinaw fire is completely out. (While they might have just forgot to change the map at the end of the season, the West Kinkatinaw fire is still showing on the Wildfire Map. Wildfires can continue to burn underground over the winter, only to flare up the next year.)
This year? Is already looking like it could be worse than last year. The province has stopped updating its drought information, but considering we were at level 5 drought conditions (that’s the worst it can be) almost consistently since June of last year, it’s hard not to be at least a little worried for 2024.
Of course, every year is different, and if not the fires, the floods. It never rains but it pours, they say. It was only a few years’ back that a portion of the Emperor’s Challenge was underwater because there was so much rain in August.
And it’s ever been such. But it feels like something has changed. The old timers used to say things like: “Hot? This is nothin’. I remember back in 1986, it got so hot that the tires on my Wabco melted,” or something like that.
But last year? Last year was bad. 2.84 million hectares burned. That’s more than double the previous worst year, which was back in 2018. Before that, the worst year was 2017.
There have been years that have had more fires. 12 years have had more than 3000 fires. 1970 saw 10 fires shy of 4000. Last year there were only 2,245. (Sorry. Forgot the scare quotes. “Only.”) But those fires?
If there’s a good side to the whole fire season, it’s that of the fires that started, only 25 percent were caused by humans. That’s still over 500 fires caused by humans, but considering the average is closer to 40 percent, that’s a sign that people might be getting the picture to be safer around fires.
Speaking of lightning, this year wasn’t a special year in terms of number of lightning strikes. At 265,321 strikes recorded, 2023 was only slightly above the 20 year average..
But Trent, you say. It’s the middle of winter. Why are we talking about forest fires. Why don’t you rant about how beautiful the ice covered lakes were, or how you haven’t managed to get out and do a midnight snowshoe to the Boulder Gardens?
I could talk about that, but if we don’t want next year to be like this year, then we need to figure out what we can do to reduce the risk of this happening again.
Note that I didn’t say “prevent this from happening again.” Nature can be unpredictable. The town could invest in wildland firefighting gear, and then a fire sparks up half a kilometre from town and blows up to 1500 ha in 45 minutes, like the West Kiskatinaw Fire. I don’t care how much firefighting gear you have, when a fire grows that fast, there’s not a lot you can do. 1500 ha is 15 sq km. If you were to take the area between the Murray River and the town, 1500 ha would be that whole area from the golf course to the Co-op card lock. In under an hour. I don’t care who you are, you’re not going to keep that sucker away from your house with a garden hose.
There’s things you can do now to help. I’ve talked about being Fire Smart in the past. Start making plans to replace that wooden gate that runs straight to your house with a metal one. Consider how you can reduce the danger of a hot coal landing on your house. Maybe it’s cleaning the gutters for the first time in a decade. Maybe it’s cutting down that highly flammable bush that’s right in front of your house. (My house. But it’s so pretty….)
And we can have constructive, considered conversations about what we can do as a town. Proposing to shut down the library, for instance, so that we can afford wildfire gear isn’t really constructive. Want to save even more money? Shut down the entire community centre. And those roads don’t really need to be ploughed in the winter, do they? That way lies madness. Or at least a whole bunch of mad people yelling at each other.
We can start having conversations as a province about what to do, too. The Provincial Government budged this year about allowing locals to help fight for their property down in the Shuswap. We should encourage ways to build on that. Back when I was younger, they would grab any able-bodied person to work on a fire line.
These days, they want some level of training. So, let’s see if we can arrange for that training as a community so those people who really want to stay behind and protect their property and the property of their neighbours, can stay and help and not be looked at by wildfire as obstacles and hazards, but as resources and allies.
Most of us who live here do so because we love this place. But this place is changing. We can learn to change with it, to find ways to stay reasonably safe, and to work together as a community, as a province and as a country to find better solutions for the future for ourselves and for future generations.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.