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As broken-hearted Jasperites begin to reckon with the full extent of their loss in the face of the inferno that consumed 30% of their mountain town last week, wildfires continue to burn swathes of wilderness in B.C. and Alberta.
Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland is himself among the broken-hearted, after the family home he moved into at the age of two, 67 years ago, and where he then raised his own children, was taken by the ferocious wildfire that overwhelmed his town last Wednesday night. At latest report, some 30% of the buildings in Jasper were lost to the flames.
Speaking right after seeing the incinerated ruin of his home, an evidently shattered Ireland reiterated his message of the ultimate healing power of “shared heartbreak,” a message that also warned against recrimination and assigning blame.
“In a time like this, a time of disaster, it is so easy to look to blame. I’m going to encourage people not to do that. There is no capriciousness here. There is no malice, there’s no ill will. This is just nature doing what nature does, and there is no need to try and explain it,” Ireland said.
Citing an earlier question he’d received about “inevitability and preparation,” Ireland called on the community to work together, looking forward, and not back: “I am confident that huge portions of our town remain standing because of the work that was done in preparation and by the people on the ground. They are still there. They are still working.”
Ireland had previously warned Parks Canada for years that the fire hazard posed by a devastating pine beetle infestation could lead to Jasper becoming “the next Fort McMurray.”
“We’ve seen what’s happened in Slave Lake, we’ve seen what’s happened in Fort McMurray, and we don’t want our community subjected to those impacts,” Ireland told CBC News back in 2017.
‘We Can’t Be Complacent’
A year later, two foresters from Prince George travelled to Jasper and reiterated their own concern that the town could soon face a “mega-fire” if the “fuel-bomb” generated by the hectares of pine beetle-killed forest were not aggressively defused, using methods other than the prescribed burns that remain Parks Canada’s go-to for dealing with the scourge of pine beetle infestations. (See here for a recent study on just how well the pine beetle is adapting to climate change.)
The foresters made a strong plug for selective logging. So did Ireland, in his interview with CBC News.
“So we think there might be other methods, some sort of selective logging process, which is anathema to Parks Canada’s mandate for ecological integrity, but this is such an unusual circumstance that we think allowances can be made to protect the community and those who live here,” he said at the time.
“We can’t be complacent. We need to take action to try and do everything we can to safeguard the community.”
But another forester said trees damaged by pine beetles wouldn’t be a major factor in the extreme conditions Jasper faced.
“The fire weather, as I understand it, for that Jasper fire was incredibly high, incredibly strong winds, very dry conditions, very little humidity. And what those extreme fire weather conditions do is they make the role of fuels actually not that important,” said Patrick James, associate professor at the University of Toronto’s graduate school of forestry. “I don’t think pine-beetle kill really played a role in this fire. I think this was an extreme heat, extreme wind, that really drove this fire to be as destructive as it was.”
As the Jasper townsite continues to smoulder, and the forests around it continue to burn, many are urging Canadian policy-makers to develop a comprehensive wildfire strategy.
“Jasper reinforces just how much we need a national wildfire strategy to bring together all levels of governance within the business and Indigenous communities to map out a blueprint for how to better predict, prevent, mitigate, and manage fires, and how to provide small boreal communities with the resources they need to make them more resilient,” writes Ed Struzik, a fellow at the Queen’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy, in a recent post on The Conversation.
“If a fire can burn the town of Jasper in a national park that has the resources to deal with fire, what does the future hold for hundreds of small boreal forest towns across the country that do not have the means, know-how, or resolve to accept that fire will come someday?,” Struzik adds.
The pine beetle infestation looms large in Struzik’s piece. He writes of helping Parks Canada fire manager Dave Smith conduct an aerial and ground survey to measure the infestation’s progress through Jasper National Park back in 2011. He also recalls Smith telling him how he was having trouble sleeping at night as he worried, not only about all the dead, highly combustible trees in the park, but of the “intense heat, extended droughts, and lightning that were intensifying in a rapidly warming world.”
Respecting Fire in a Climate Crisis
Thirteen years later, Struzik is urging policy-makers to spend at least as much on wildfire science as they do on wildfire suppression, and for everyone to reconceive what wildfires represent, both in themselves, and in the context of the climate crisis. “More dark days may be coming unless we develop a culture, and political policies, that respect fire, drawing upon the wealth of valuable insights in Indigenous fire stewardship practices,” he writes.
“A century of fire suppression has left behind too many aging trees and not enough space for more resilient stands to be regenerated,” he adds. He also calls out policy-makers like Alberta Premier Danielle Smith who, notwithstanding her recent performance of abject grief over Jasper’s catastrophic wildfire, continues her party’s ongoing “gutting” of provincial firefighting crews and budgets.
Struzik also stresses the “unequivocal” connection between an ever-worsening wildfire situation and the climate crisis. “Wildfire seasons will continue to worsen, and our political leadership must find a way to stop the madness of our addiction to oil and gas,” he writes, citing a July 25 Facebook post by Rob Walker, a former Parks Canada fire and vegetation specialist.
Stopping the madness will require holding the companies that furnish and enable that addiction to account. A May, 2023 study by Cambridge-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the University of California, Merced identified 88 carbon-producing heavyweights that were responsible for 37% of the wildfire losses in western regions of Canada and the United States between 1986 and 2021. Thirteen of the 88 were oil and gas companies operating or based in Canada, including five of the six that make up the Pathways Alliance oil sands lobby group.
“News that firefighting resources were diverted from the Jasper firefight to protect the Trans Mountain pipeline that runs through the park is raising eyebrows, especially given the company’s own recent assessment that the pipeline’s wildfire risk was ‘low,’” reports The Narwhal.”
The latest Parks Canada update has the 32,000-hectare fire “still burning to the north, south, and east of the Jasper townsite,” with fire behaviour expected to increase “as fuels continue to dry out.” The fire is now expected to burn for months, reports CTV News Edmonton.
West Kootenay Wildfires Worsen
In latest news from B.C., evacuation orders have been issued for the mountain village of Slocan (pop. 400), in the West Kootenay region. Twenty-three kilometres due north of Slocan along Highway 6, the hamlet of Silverton remains under evacuation order as the threat posed by both the Aylwin Creek and Komonko Creek wildfires (both out of control, and now collectively engulfing 29 square kilometres of territory) continues.
Located at the southern tip of Slocan Lake, Slocan is threatened by the Mulvey Creek (1,098 hectares) and Ponderosa (671 hectares) fires, both of which were sparked by the same lighting storm that set Aylwin and Komonko alight on July 17.
The Mulvey fire is burning to the southwest of the Slocan townsite, on the west side of the Slocan River, in Valhalla Provincial Park. The Ponderosa fire is centred a few kilometres southeast of Slocan, on the east side of the river. The evacuation order issued for Slocan also covers 400 properties on both side of the river, as far south as Lemon Creek.
The evacuation of Slocan and points south comes three days after Argenta and Johnson’s Landing, both small farming communities at the northeast end of Kootenay Lake, were evacuated away from a wildfire now burning out of control on a mountain slope behind them.
Some 30 kilometres north of Argenta, four hikers trapped on the Macbeth Ice Field by another advancing wildfire were rescued last week by a Kaslo Search and Rescue team searching for them by helicopter after they sent an SOS via text message.
“Embers were falling on their tent so they ran for their lives,” Kaslo Search and Rescue team member Mark Jennings-Bates told CBC News.
Bates added that the dramatic rescue, which involved the helicopter flying through heavy smoke, should remind everyone of the need to be prepared to flee at a moment’s notice during the province’s wildfire season. “Have a plan, make sure people know that plan,” he said.
While the West Kootenay has seen a cooling trend over the past few days, intense heat is due to settle back into the drought-stricken region by Thursday.
Relief in Barkerville and Golden, Northern Alberta Still Burning
Elsewhere in B.C., there is considerable relief in the historic town of Barkerville, which has been saved (for now) from being devoured by the Antler Creek wildfire (still out of control, 14,293 hectares) by a combination of cooler weather and the efforts of the B.C Wildfire Service and local staff. Teams worked around the clock to protect “the largest living history museum in western North America” from the flames with a “spiderweb” of sprinklers and hoses, reports the CBC News.
Golden residents are likewise breathing a bit more easily as the same cooler weather, plus a similar all-out effort, protected their mountain town of 4,000 from the Dogtooth Forest Service Road fire (out of control, 5,445 hectares). At latest report, wildfire crews and the local fire department were “making good progress” on the 55-square-kilometre blaze that destroyed as many as six homes on the outskirts of Golden last week.
B.C.’s longest-running and largest “wildfire of note,” the Shetland Creek blaze (22,000 hectares), continues to burn out of control 130 kilometres southwest of Kamloops, with the hamlet of Spences Bridge (pop. 140) currently under an evacuation alert.
In Alberta, fires in the Cattail Lake Complex north of Fort McMurray continue to burn out of control, with the largest, at 106,725 hectares, less than seven kilometres northeast of oil sands operations. A second smaller fire (17,814 hectares) is burning seven kilometres to the south.
Some 5,500 members of Little Red River Cree Nation remain under evacuation order as the six wildfires in the sprawling Semo Complex continue to burn out of control, threatening the communities of Garden River, John D’or Prairie, and Fox Lake.
