Powell River has added itself to a list of communities around the province developing community wildfire protection plans, but work to make the region more wildfire resistant could take years to complete.
Since 2004, a total of 284 community wildfire protection plans have been completed in the province and 33 more are in progress.
The Peak contacted Ryan Thoms, manager of emergency services for the Powell River Regional Emergency Program, to discuss how prepared the Upper Sunshine Coast is in the event of an urban-interface wildfire.
“There’s room for improvement,” Thoms said, though he explained that the regional district had just reached a milestone with the final draft of Powell River’s community wildfire protection plan. The plan, which provides a high-level look at fire risk in the region, includes input from all fire departments, including Tla’amin (Sliammon) First Nation, regional district staff and a consultant from BA Blackwell and Associates Ltd.
“But that in itself is not the end of the road because really this lays out a whole bunch of recommendations, suggestions and areas for improvement,” he said.
Thoms added that the consultant’s report is months of collaborative work which includes GIS mapping of the region to identify forest fuels.
Urban interface areas such as the City of Powell River rank moderate with a minor occurrence of extreme fire risk in isolated parts of the study area, the report said.
But community wildfire plans not only identify risk, they also identify measures necessary to mitigate it.
The report makes 32 recommendations around four areas, including increasing public education, structure protection, emergency response and management practices of interface forestlands.
“The biggest area we’ll start working on is education,” Thoms said, adding that homeowners can take deliberate measures on their property that slow fire spread rates. “In terms of interface fires, what people do or don’t do on their private property can have impacts on the community.”
In the 10 years since the provincial government identified much of the province’s urban interface land as vulnerable to catastrophic wildfire, less than 10 per cent of it has been treated to reduce the risk through vegetation management and planned burns, said government watchdog Forest Practices Board (FPB) last month.
The BC government has contributed $67 million to wildfire protection programs over the past 10 years, but the FPB report concludes that the scale of the problem is so large that the funding and programs have not made a significant improvement.
FPB chairman Tim Ryan has estimated it would cost up to $10,000 per hectare to treat interface land, cleaning up debris, pruning low-hanging limbs and thinning out forests. Ministry of forests, lands and natural resource operations minister Steve Thomson, however, has said the government pegs the cost closer to $6,000 per hectare, but added that to reduce catastrophic fires in residential areas will require the partnerships between municipalities, first nations, industry and property owners.
What both the government and FPB agree on is that homeowners and communities need to band together to increase awareness of the problem and work to improve fire safety on private property.
For Thoms, the community wildfire plan is a first step to making Powell River safer despite the risks.
“But for now it’s not going to change the course of this summer’s fire season — other than just the good work that our fire departments do already,” he said. “We’ve now got a lot we need to do.”
For more information about Powell River’s community wildfire protection plan, the report can be read online.
~ with files from Business in Vancouver
Publication aids homeowners
Local governments and Wildfire Management Branch have distributed the Home Owners FireSmart Manual across the province and are relying on the program to encourage homeowners and private landowners to take steps to reduce the wildfire risk to their own lives and properties.
A key part of being FireSmart is designating zones around buildings and facilities. For example, the area within 10 metres of the building, called priority zone one, should not be able to support fire. In this zone, FireSmart recommends that grass should be mowed and watered, ground litter and dead material should be removed annually, bushes and shrubs should be removed and combustibles such as firewood should not be present. Zone two extends out another 20 metres and fuel there should be reduced by thinning and pruning trees. Zone three extends a further 70 metres and the objective is to thin the area so that fires will be lower intensity.
Additionally, FireSmart has homeowners look at the building materials roofs and home siding is constructed of and suggests alternatives which are less vulnerable to fire.
The Home Owners FireSmart Manual can be found online.
