Above photo: Brandon Broderick’s 2023 photo of the West Kiskatinaw fire at sunset.
The 2024 Wildfire season is fast approaching, and the District of Tumbler Ridge is doing what it can to reduce the risk.
At a special meeting of Council, Enrico Fionda, Wildfire Prevention Officer at the Prince George Fire Centre, Dallas Gatchell, Wildfire Technician for the Dawson Creek Fire Zone and Community Forester Duncan McKellar joined council to discuss ways to make the town more fire resistant.
Fionda says there are three funding programs available to communities to help mitigate wildfres.
“The first one is through the union of BC municipalities and it’s called the Fire Smart Community Funding and Supports Program,” he says. “I know that the District of Tumbler Ridge already has the intention of putting in an application for this year.”
He says this is the main program geared towards communities and municipalities to receive funding to undertake fire prevention work within their jurisdiction. “It will fund up to $200,000 for the community to undertake all sorts of activities. there’s quite a diversity of things that are fundable through that for the community to undertake.”
The main focus with this program, he says, is education. “It is focused on fire prevention education for the community, whether that’s through events, or going around and educating private landowners as to how to undertake prevention on their own private property.”
He says that one of the most successful things in preventing structural damage to homes is property owners making small changes around their properties.
The application process, says Fionda, can be onerous. “The first year that you’re applying for it, it’s a lot of work and it can be a little bit overwhelming,” he says. “The advantage of including these activities is next year the application process will be easier.”
He says there are three priorities to focus on.
The first is to create a Wildfire Protection Plan. “I know this isn’t the first time that Tumbler Ridge has done this. The first one was done in 2006 and it was updated in 2014. So we’re ten years later and I think it’s an appropriate time to be looking to update it.
He says this plan will guide all the fire smart and prevention activities in Tumbler Ridge. While the emphasis is mostly on education and planning, as well as fuel reduction on District owned lands and infrastructure, there are funds available for fuel reduction on crown land, though, he says, there are other programs that are designed specifically for that. “We’ve been seeing more applications that are focused primarily just on the land that the municipality owns. And it makes sense. It’s your jurisdiction and your critical infrastructure. And the Crown can work with the other stakeholders to come up with a plan for the Crown part.”
Community Forester Duncan McKellar points out that this is different then the older protection plan. “This focuses, like he mentioned, on municipal lands versus Crown land. We haven’t been doing it that way in the past. There’s reasons why the province has decided to split those away. Most communities don’t have a lot of Crown land around them.”
“It’s a lot of work to look at all of the Crown land around the community,” says Fionda. “The area that we look at for these plans is one kilometre around the community. If you chose to focus on municipal property, you don’t need to spend a whole bunch of time or money to look at a whole bunch of forest. It turns into a lot more work when you start to include all Crown provincial land in the one kilometre area around your community. The big thing now is it’s not a requirement.”
One of the new things in the program, he says, is the municipality can use some of the funds to go onto private land and help mitigate fuel hazards for properties owned by seniors. “There’s funding to create a structure protection trailer for the community. So there’s all of these new activities that focus more on resiliency for the community itself, and not on the forestry aspect of fuel treatments on Crown land.”
McKellar says in the past, the community forest was focused primarily on fuel reduction and a large percentage of it was on Crown land around the community. “There were some areas, like around the pond, that was private land as well as some of the other small areas behind the hotel. But this new resiliency plan, just so you can get your head around it, is focused on municipal lands and it’s more focused on the community itself.”
The next thing the community needs to look at, suggests Fionda, is a Fire Smart Resiliency Committee. “Maybe you have something similar already in place, but it’s a committee to take things from that plan that’s developed and help push those things forward.”
As part of that, there a Fire Smart Coordinator position that will be put into place, funded through the program. “The role of that person is to help with education and outreach of all the Fire Smart activities, but they’ll be trying to implement some of the recommendations made in the plan. It’s one thing to create a plan or hire a consultant to create a plan. It’s another thing to deliver on the recommendations. So having the Fire Smart Coordinator position will help ensure that the plan doesn’t just sit on a shelf.”
In addition to having the community forest on the Fire Smart Resiliency Committee, Fionda says that, in other communities industry and clubs such as the snowmobile club and the outdoor club. “I wouldn’t limit it, but I would definitely invite people that you think would be interested,” he says.
Chief Curry says that the application for the Fire Smart Community Funding has been submitted to the UBCM. “At this time we received a response back that would be have a caseworker assigned to it, and it’s under review currently.”
He says there is no committee in place, but it is part of the grant funding request. If the grant is not successful, he says it is important enough and it would be added to next year’s budget.
The next source of potential funding is the Crown Land Wildfire Risk Reduction Program. This is, says Fionda run by the forest district. “This is a provincial government program that exists. They have a risk reduction plan for the area and they’re going to hopefully do Tumbler Ridge this year.”
The program, he says, would look at Crown land within 2.75 km of Tumbler Ridge. “They’ll be looking at it specifically for fuel treatment. I know a similar plan was done a couple years ago in 2021. And what we’re hoping this year, if they are able to successfully move forward with that project is to include the community forest in that process. They would have a plan that would identify high risk areas where if they wanted to apply for funding through another program they could go in and write prescriptions for that, and then treat it the next year.
Councillor Norbury says he thinks the plans need to be more aggressive when it comes to fuel reduction. “Do we potentially see an opportunity for being more aggressive when it comes to treatment areas, like setting up a rotational basis of going in and brush clearing or going in and getting a large path of brush cleared out?”
Fionda says that depends on what makes sense for the forest and for the community. “There’s a lot of things that come into play as to whether an aggressive treatment is appropriate,” he says. “From a fire behaviour perspective, an aggressive treatment makes a lot of sense. But we’ve seen with other communities where an aggressive treatment was prescribed, but the residents near it do not want it. So, there’s a balance that has to happen and I think it comes down to the community and what their tolerance is for an aggressive treatment.”
Norbury wonders if there is a way to gauge a community’s interest in how aggressive a treatment could be. “I know this is a sensitive issue with a lot of people. We live in the wilderness and people embrace that lifestyle. But at the same time, I’d rather err on the side of safety.”
Fionda says the Fire Smart Community Funding is a great way to start. “You can start educating people as to what is fuel treatment and what works. So, that’s one avenue and that’s something that is being funded through the program. Also, you could pick a treatment area and call it a demonstration area. This is a nice way that we’ve seen communities get comfortable with treatment. It’s one thing to see something on paper or on a map, but to actually see a demonstration of what a treatment looks like is different. Sometimes it means starting small, and allowing the community members to go and take a look and see what that actually looks like when it’s implemented. People generally like to see what a treatment looks like before it’s applied broadly around their community.”
He repeats that it’s what’s done on people’s properties that is the most important aspect of protecting structures. “With the fires that we’ve seen in the last couple of years, a fuel treatment can create opportunities for crews to action a fire, but it’s very rare that it can actually stop it. The actual treatments that people do around their houses or that we do around critical infrastructure is what—when a fire rolls through—save the structures themselves. So although the field treatments are good and they’re important, they’re just one aspect of it. I would say the priority should be around the actual values that you’re hoping to protect.”
The final program Fionda discusses is the Forest Enhancement Society of BC Program for field treatment. “All of these funding streams are focused on a roughly two kilometre buffer around the community,” he says. “This one is also focused right around the community. It’s just another mechanism for the community forest, if they wanted to directly apply for funding to do treatments. There’s a bit more flexibility with this program to tie it in with the operations that are already occurring in the tenure area.”
He says because of the fact that it covers a similar area as the Crown Land Wildfire Risk Reduction Program, once the gets completed by the forest region it becomes a source of funding for a group like the community forest.”
Indeed, he says, if the community forest wants to take control and actual write the prescriptions, then this is probably the best source of funding. “You already have the cutting permit for [the area],” he says. “It’s already set up nicely for the community forest to do that if they want to. If the community forest is the proponent, they already know what areas are being planned for and you can kind of tie in some of the wildfire risk reduction activities with the activities that are already occurring. There’s different ways to implement treatments. It’s just picking one that makes the most sense, and the one that the people who are in Tumbler Ridge have the most say.”
Those are the formal programs, says Fionda, but there are other ways to work together. “If there’s activities that we can have the crews come down and be part of, for instance,” he says. “Maybe you’re having a fire smart event and those types of things are where we can work together. Or if there’s a prescribed burning, we can try to support you. For instance, we can have the local crews come out and work together.”
Duncan McKellar says the discussion was very informative. “We can now see the different avenues of jurisdiction for one and funding sources for other. For these last ten years or so, we worked with the district, and whether we were on Crown land or municipal land, we discussed what we would do there and we treated it the same, apart from the logistics of the administration. It’s not like that anymore.”
He says the plan for the community forest is to wait for the wildfire assessment program to be completed, and then work with the town and the province to come up with a plan. “You have to have the data in front of you to make an intelligent decision,” he says. “If someone comes to me, for example, and they had concern that there was a fire source or fire hazard behind their place and they weren’t sure if it was the town or Crown land, well, now we can break that out.”
Larry White says he’s at the meeting representing the Grizzly Valley Saddle Club. “I’m wondering if we could have a representative work with Mr. Curry in mitigating the fire hazard around the saddle club?”
The mayor says yes, talk to the fire chief. “We’re all about that,” says the mayor. “Not just our local volunteer fire department or BC Wildfire Service, but staff, council…we’re all concerned. We all want to make sure whatever we can do to assist, we want to do that.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.