Wildfire protection plans should be mandatory to build in B.C.’s fire-hazard zones, experts say

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Twenty years ago, as a newly minted planner with the City of Kelowna, Ryan Smith found himself helping to load spooked cattle into a livestock trailer as a wildfire bore down on the city.

Now, as divisional director of planning and development services for the city, Mr. Smith is dealing with the aftermath of a different set of fires – ones that have set records in terms of area burned and have served as a harrowing reminder of the risks of living in a wildfire zone.

Over those two decades, Mr. Smith and other Kelowna residents have lived through a period of both increasing wildfire risk and heightened awareness of how to mitigate the threat.

In 2005, spurred by the catastrophic damage in Kelowna, Ottawa released its Canadian Wildland Fire Strategy, which set out steps to protect communities and better manage forests made vulnerable to fire by pests or disease.

In B.C., successive provincial governments have commissioned reports assessing wildfire risk, resulting in changes such as wildfire protection plans meant to prevent the type of damage seen in 2003, when the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire destroyed 239 homes. Now there are questions about how well those plans worked, how they can be improved and what else can be done to reduce the likelihood of homes being destroyed and people being displaced, sometimes for years.

“I think we’ve done a decent job,” Mr. Smith said, adding that costs and staffing can influence whether cities such as Kelowna implement all the steps recommended in a wildfire plan.

“We know what the best practices are, what the recommendations are. I think we just need to figure out the incentives and the supports to make it happen.”

Cities on the edge

Recent wildfires in B.C. have hit West Kelowna and Kelowna, where parts of both cities are in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, where human-built structures meet wildland fuels, such as forests and grasslands. With the amount of area burned by wildfires expected to increase in the coming years, there’s growing interest in how to protect communities in the WUI zone.

Wildland-urban interface

Building footprints

Year-to-date areas burned

Estimates as of Aug. 31

B.C.

Kelowna

Kelowna

West

Kelowna

Okanagan

Lake

1 km

MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: NATURAL RESOURCES CANADA; CANADIAN FOREST SERVICE; UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA; MICROSOFT; OPENSTREETMAP; BC WILDFIRE SERVICE

Cities on the edge

Recent wildfires in B.C. have hit West Kelowna and Kelowna, where parts of both cities are in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, where human-built structures meet wildland fuels, such as forests and grasslands. With the amount of area burned by wildfires expected to increase in the coming years, there’s growing interest in how to protect communities in the WUI zone.

Wildland-urban interface

Building footprints

Year-to-date areas burned

Estimates as of Aug. 31

B.C.

Kelowna

Kelowna

West

Kelowna

Okanagan

Lake

1 km

MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: NATURAL RESOURCES CANADA; CANADIAN FOREST SERVICE; UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA; MICROSOFT; OPENSTREETMAP; BC WILDFIRE SERVICE

Cities on the edge

Recent wildfires in B.C. have hit West Kelowna and Kelowna, where parts of both cities are in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, where human-built structures meet wildland fuels, such as forests and grasslands. With the amount of area burned by wildfires expected to increase in the coming years, there’s growing interest in how to protect communities in the WUI zone.

Wildland-urban interface

Building footprints

Year-to-date areas burned

Estimates as of Aug. 31

B.C.

Kelowna

Kelowna

West Kelowna

Okanagan Lake

1 km

MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: NATURAL RESOURCES CANADA; CANADIAN FOREST SERVICE; UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA; MICROSOFT; OPENSTREETMAP; BC WILDFIRE SERVICE

The threat of fire in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) – where human development meets the natural environment – is expected to grow in the coming decades as heat and drought make wildfire seasons longer and more severe. A provincial review commissioned after the devastating wildfire season of 2003 warned that WUI fires in B.C. would increase unless significant actions were taken. The report, by former Manitoba premier Gary Filmon, made dozens of recommendations, including the use of FireSmart, a national program designed to reduce wildfire risk by, for example, building with fire-resistant materials.

For Kelowna, acting on all those fronts has been made more challenging by the city’s rapid growth. The Kelowna Census Metropolitan Area, which takes in Kelowna, West Kelowna, Lake Country and Peachland, was the fastest-growing CMA in Canada between 2016 and 2021, reflected in new subdivisions that have crept up hillsides and into the woods. The Kelowna CMA grew 14 per cent over that period and is now home to more than 235,000 people.

As part of Kelowna’s wildfire protection plan, some newer developments have carried out fuel treatments – burning or thinning dense forests to reduce flammable material. They helped slow fires that threatened the city this month, Mr. Smith said. The city has also moved away from cul-de-sacs – one-way-in, one-way-out designs that can become deathtraps in a wildfire – and is shifting from single-home subdivisions, which have dominated growth for much of the past two decades, to multifamily developments and increased density.

Bruce Blackwell, a consultant who contributed to the 2003 Filmon report and has since worked with dozens of communities, including Kelowna and West Kelowna, to develop wildfire protection plans, would like to see the province set mandatory standards for where and how construction can take place in WUIs.

“I think with the losses that we’ve seen and the way things are going, we need to mandate this in certain communities,” Mr. Blackwell said.

That option was flagged in the Filmon report, which said that in the aftermath of the 2003 wildfire season, the government had an opportunity to “mandate long-term community fireproofing programs which will build upon local zoning and building codes.”

B.C. Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon was not available for an interview. In an e-mailed response to questions from The Globe and Mail, ministry staff said the province is a strong proponent of the FireSmart program, that climate and geographic conditions in different parts of the province require different approaches to wildfire safety, and that local authorities are best positioned to assess and mitigate wildfire risks.

Officials in West Kelowna, which has been hit hard by the McDougall Creek fire, with dozens of homes destroyed, were not immediately able to respond to a request for comment about its wildfire protection plan.

Like Mr. Smith, Andrew Gaucher has memories of the 2003 Kelowna fire. Now vice-president of Kelowna-based GGroup Development, Mr. Gaucher was a teenager in 2003 when his family’s home was placed under an evacuation order. This summer, he spent a week under evacuation order again, this time with his children.

He lives in McKinley Landing and is managing the buildout of McKinley Beach, an upscale development on the east shore of Okanagan Lake. Over the past 10 years, he said, the company has carried out fuel treatments on more than half of its 350-hectare development site.

“For most fires, these kinds of practices help,” Mr. Gaucher said.

The province funds fuel treatment but experts say those projects fall short of what’s required. In a June report, the B.C. Forest Practices Board said little more than 1 per cent of B.C.’s WUIs had been treated since 2018.

West Kelowna has submitted a proposal to the Union of B.C. Municipalities for more preventive funding, saying the amount allotted to communities – $13-million in 2022 – is “exponentially smaller” than what is spent on wildfire suppression each year.

Fes de Scally, another long-time Okanagan resident, would also like to see more resources put into prevention. A former professor of geography at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, he used to live in West Kelowna Estates, a well-treed neighbourhood with stunning views, but moved across the lake to Kelowna a few years ago, in large part because the wooded hillsides around his former home made him nervous.

“The purse strings are open when there’s a fire,” Mr. de Scally said. “Yet when we’re trying to preemptively do something about reducing the wildfire risk around our communities, we have to go begging for small grants from government to do that work. And that’s an awfully strange ratio.”

“We should be putting at least as much effort into preventing fires around our community as fighting them.”