Above photo: A Google Earth rendering of the area set aside for the proscribed burn. Highway 29 is to the east, while Bergeron Drive is to the north The white and yellow line represents the actual burn area, while the purple like is a water hose that will circle it.
In an effort to help Tumbler Ridge be more resistant to fires starting in the bush near town, the District is planning a controlled burn later this month.
According to Brian Robinson, FireSmart Coordinator for Tumbler Ridge, this is the first step in an ongoing process.
“In the summer of 2024, Chief Curry met with a few individuals from BC Wildfire Service, and they toured multiple areas around town in search of a couple of viable areas that may be conducive to a prescribed burn,” says Robinson. “Out of that came the two areas: one is north of town, past the Saddle Club. That area was at that time in the midst of a transfer between Crown land to municipal land. So that held the process up. It’s still being looked at in the future, and will hinge on the success of this program. For now, we will just not worry about that.”
The second area that was identified, and the first one to qualify for a proscribed burn is an area between town and the Lions Flatbed campground. “The main reason it was selected was because of the slope located within the main area of the burn unit as well as the fuel types, which are mostly dried accumulated grasses, as well as juniper bushes.”
This area is right alongside the highway, he says, and there’s a possibility that a discarded cigarette butt, or a spark from traffic, or even an ember throw from the Flatbed campground, could easily catch the dry grass on fire.
“Fire naturally wants to travel uphill,” says Robinson. “The conductive forces of the heat dry the fuels ahead of it and then start to preheat things. Generally, the winds also push embers uphill as well, generating spot fires ahead of the main fire, which eventually join to be a larger fire. The slope all heads upwards into town, all very open, gets a lot of sun in the spring and fall. There’s a heavy accumulation of branches, heavy accumulation of dried grasses, and a lot of needle and leaf loading. It’s just a very volatile area, and would not take much of an ignition to get that fire going.”
At the top of the hill, the dried grass gives way to a thicker forested area or conifer timber, which abuts the Bergeron Drive area. “If there was a fire, we would see an escalation of fire behavior from the ground fire on that slope up into the canopy and then potentially into the residential neighborhood.”
It is, in fact, the poster child for an area needing fire mitigation. While there are other areas that are under consideration, they are not as ideal, and would need more preparation. “I think there’s quite a few potential areas, say, extending further along Bergeron Drive.”
But what about other areas farther away from town? Robinson says those areas are not being ignored, but he is the FireSmart Coordinator for the District of Tumbler Ridge, and those areas are not owned by the District. Instead, he is looking at the 46 acres of land north of Peace River Crescent, the area around the Saddle Club and the area around the golf course, as well as the public spaces like parks in town. These are not, he says, being slated for proscribed burning, but will probably have some of the underbrush removed as well as low hanging branches (so-called “ladder fuel”, allowing slower moving ground fires to move into the taller trees, where it can get blown along much faster.)
“Our FireSmart funding for the municipality of Tumbler Ridge only pertains to municipal property within two kilometres of Tumbler Ridge with a structure density of six structures per kilometre.” This leaves a very small portion of the land around the community that he can plan mitigation around. Another area that he is looking at, though, is the area just west of the heavy industrial park, southwest of town. “That’s the extend of our wildland urban interface.”
There’s also a number of areas inside that radius that are part of the West Moberly and Saulteau First Nations’ Treaty Land Entitlement areas. Robinson says he’s hoping to work with the Nations to make these areas as firesmart as possible. “I’ve reached out to West Moberly to discuss potential mitigation opportunities in their portion of the 100 acre woods, because there’s a funding branch through First Nation Emergency Service supports, which could be available.”
And outside the town’s sphere of influence? He says the BC Wildfire Service has plans for a number of controlled burns beyond that. “As this program is going on within the municipality,” he says, “the province is also running a Northeast Wildland Urban Interface Wildfire Risk Reduction, which will look along the access and egress routes into and out of Tumbler Ridge that fall outside of our two kilometre range so that we can verify more than one evacuation route should one be challenged.”
But this doesn’t mean that the community will be safe from wildfire, merely that it reduces the risk of wildfires getting out of hand near to town. But what happens if a fire like 2023’s West Kiskatinaw fire starts to charge the town? “Those measures offer the opportunity for timely evacuation, safe evacuation and opportunities for first responders to actually have defendable spaces around the town,” he says. “As opposed to shuttling everybody out and then starting to see if there’s any defendable spaces at all. It’s too late to think about fire smarting when the smoke column is coming over the hill. But there are a lot of small steps that we can take that can give firefighters those critical few hours.”
He says it is nearly impossible to take enough steps to prevent a rank five wildfire from going where it wants to go. “We could cut down all the trees in a two kilometer ring around Tumbler Ridge, but that would definitely affect the aesthetic appeal of the town as well as the vibe that everybody is here to experience, We like to see the deer and coyotes walk right through town. It’s kind of why people are here.”
Besides which, as fire behaviour changes, the impact it has changes, too. “It seems like a few years ago, fires were spotting one kilometre, then fires were spotting two kilometers. Now fires are spotting five kilometers. When does that ring become ineffective? We make it two kilometres, then we have to make it three kilometers. We live in an area prone to a lot of diverse and strong winds. We are susceptible to ember throw regardless of the direction. A lot of our recent fires would have thrown embers from the CN parking lot over by the Murray and into town. I think the most adaptable way to do this is to have a ring of targeted mitigation surrounding the community that allows us to drop the fire behavior should the fire come up. This allows us to mount a bit of a defense.”
A large part of that, he says is to also have people in the community firesmart their property. And this, he says, will be a significant part of his job moving forward.
But what does that mean? He says one simple way is to make sure your roof is clear of debris. An ember that lands on a roof—even an asphalt roof— has less of a chance of starting a fire if it has nothing to work with. But if an ember lands on a roof and rolls down into the gutter, and that gutter is full of pine needles, it has more of a chance of starting a fire.
Robinson has guidelines on how to FireSmart your property. You can also find details online at the FireSmart BC home page.
For now, his main focus is preparing a Community Wildfire Resiliency Plan (CWRP) to present to the mayor council as well as the public, which should be made public in the next few weeks. “The plan will outline the next five years of wildfire mitigation for Tumbler Ridge. It will identify treatment units around the Tumbler Ridge town site as well as around the Tumbler Ridge Industrial Park. And it’ll outline a schedule for treatments of these units over the next five years with approximate costs.”
At the end of those five years, he says, there should be an established ring of protection around Tumbler Ridge. “And then the CWRP will probably be shifted to focus on the maintenance of all of the mitigations we have then established, including some of the community forest treatments along areas such as the golf course road, in behind the industrial park in town here and those areas.”
One of the more interesting aspect of the CWRP is a Tumbler Ridge Plant Program. “The idea is to promote plants that are considered fire resistant or ignition resistant,” he says. “I’m hoping to get that off the ground this summer. The goal is to help homeowners identify replacement plants for coniferous and other flammable shrubs, as well as other general things they can do with landscaping to reduce the risk of wildfire taking hold. And then there’s building construction things, such as ignition resistant roofing, non-combustible siding and metal flashing over wooden roof joists or wooden foundations.”
One easy thing to do, he says, is install metal gates. “Tumbler Ridge has a lot of aging wooden infrastructure—from house exteriors to wood sheds, to firewood piles, to decks, to fence lines and gates. It’s a lot of horizontal fuel continuity, which means a fire can start at one end of the street. And with relatively no wind or sparking can essentially just burn its way down the street till the next end without needing to jumping too far between any items.” Breaking that by installing a metal gate is a simple thing that people can do.
“The other thing is, when a wildfire enters a community, it’s no longer a wildfire. It’s now just a fire. We should also think about: what if my neighbor’s house lights on fire because they have an electrical issue or they left something on the stove? Fire smarting our homes can help more than just wildfire events.”
While there is no date set yet for the controlled burn, Robinson says it should be soon. “Essentially, we’ll do it as soon as all approvals are in and we have enough snow gone to be productive. In a perfect world, there’d still be snow in that coniferous belt immediately behind Bergeron to allow for an extra sense of security. But that slope is going to be one of the first snow free areas around town.”
Robinson has done a pair of presentations around town about the controlled burn, and is planning on doing at least one more tonight (March 7), starting at 6:30 in Room 4 at the Community Centre. He will also be at the Winterfest events on March 8 at the Golf Course.
For more details on how to FireSmart your home or property, visit FireSmartBC.ca
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
