Back in 2004, when the eyes of the province were watching Kelowna and Barriere being razed by wildfires, the largest fire in the province went largely unnoticed.
The Chilko Lake fire, at times, eclipsed 20,000 hectares in size. It threatened the communities of Anahim Lake and Nimpo Lake as it raced north from an area known locally as the Brittany Triangle.
In the end, it only claimed one house, so it paled in comparison to the devastation in the Okanagan and the Thompson Valley. Following the Kelowna and Barriere fires we learned a lot of lessons. All of a sudden ‘interface fires’ became a common term. Communities started developing plans for interface fires and residents were painfully aware of how a little preparation may spare their home in the case of a devastating forest fire.
I was working Williams Lake at the time of the Chilko Lake fire and being the paper of record for the area, we covered the fire extensively. We told some amazing stories about the Chilko Lake fire. Some stories were about the brave effort to fight it (although the province’s first reaction was to let it burn because it was not near civilization), but many stories were also about the nature of the fire.
It was a fire like no other. It was big, of course, but it behaved differently. The fire jumped the Taseko River several times as it burned north. Rivers, especially large ones, are often used as fire breaks as they provide a natural break in the burning forest. Crews built firebreaks along the river, extending the natural firebreaks. It was to no avail. We heard stories of burning pine cones and other debris being carried upwind several miles. Spot fires were breaking out behind workers building firebreaks well ahead of the flames.
One of the other stories we reported about that fire was the difficulty fire crews had in battling the fire on the ground. The reason? The debris on the forest floor was six to eight feet deep. Brush, branches, dead trees, etc., were piled so high firefighters couldn’t even walk through the forest, much less fight a fire in it.
The Brittany Triangle was one of the areas hit by the fire mountain pine beetle attack in the 1980s (for those who like to point fingers, the Brittany Triangle is a stone’s throw away from Tweedsmuir Park). We knew less about the mountain beetle then than we did now. However, much of the beetle-killed forest was left standing. It was discovered that, in the dry Chilcotin Plateau, the wood remained merchantable for many, many years. That time passed and the trees started to decay and fall, creating an impassable quagmire of wood so dry it could ignite from the spark of a skid-plate on rock.
Here we are 20 years later and the amount of timber killed and left to rot in the Chilcotin is miniscule compared to amount that has been killed across the North since then.
So what’s the message here? We need to do something with the beetle-killed timber now, before it becomes a fire hazard of Biblical proportions.
Premier Gordon Campbell gave a wonderfully inspiring speech Friday about how forestry will always be Number 1 in British Columbia and how we need to think differently to deal the challenges ahead. He talked about the mountain pine beetle infestation in Tweedsmuir Park and how the thinking of the day was that it would take care of itself. In today’s world, he said, we can no longer wait for things to take care of itself. Great advice.
Ron Betts, of the Western Silviculture Contractors Association who also raised the fire spectre, told a story of how the province has cut back on the number of trees it plants every year, how fewer surveys of the forest are being done to determine exactly what is happening in the forest, how we’re doing less brushing, less fertilizing, less pruning, and less spacing in our forests.
Yes, it appears we’re not letting things take care of themselves and there’s a firestorm over the hill.