The wildfire burden to B.C.’s society, economy and environment over the past decade can be measured in the tens of billions of dollars. And yet, successive provincial governments have significantly underfunded programs that would mitigate the destruction.
Under the previous B.C. Liberal government, the 12-year period after the wildfire review by Gary Filmon saw a little over $100 million spent on wildfire hazard mitigation close to communities — a ratio of approximately $1 spent on mitigation for every $100 spent on response and recovery.
This, unfortunately, is an all-too-frequent pattern: a minuscule, upfront investment in mitigation and prevention, but a massive expenditure in response and recovery during and after the fire. Recently, the UN’s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction pointed out that 87 per cent of investments associated with natural disasters goes into response and post-disaster recovery and only 13 per cent is invested up front in mitigation.
The current NDP government has rolled out a new program — Community Resiliency Initiative — that has budgeted only $50 million over three years to mitigation. The current government also inherited the Forest Enhancement Society grant program, which provides funding for landscape fuel treatments, but that program has only $60 million remaining and is due to expire at the end of 2019 (with no word of a replacement program). And this fund is not all earmarked for wildfire hazard mitigation; funds are also provided for wildlife habitat enhancement, as well as carbon-storage strategies (i.e., tree planting), and better fibre utilization.
Disconcertingly, this current approach from the provincial government places less emphasis on treating the fuels that give energy to wildfires and more on the FireSmart program, which focuses on public education, planning, etc. (the highest risk communities can receive a maximum of $100,000 per year — which is enough to treat about 17 hectares of hazardous fuels).
Promoting individual responsibility for mitigating natural disturbance risks on homeowners’ property is never a bad thing. And programs such as FireSmart have a role to play in a comprehensive approach to community-level awareness of wildfire threat and how to mitigate it. But a program such as FireSmart isn’t the sole solution.
Uptake in the program among homeowners is low, and in many cases, unless your neighbours also make the initial and continued investment, you can still lose your home to a wildfire. Research carried out since the Fort McMurray fire suggests that mitigation costs could range from $18 to $26 a square foot to bring an existing structure up to code. For a typical 2,000-square-foot home, the cost would be between $36,000 and $52,000, and that includes only roofing, siding, decks and fencing (it doesn’t include gutters, eaves, windows and vents).
If we focus only on promoting FireSmart as the solution, as some suggest, and don’t make the big investment in landscape hazard mitigation, we have to accept a wildfire threatening a community or even worse, burning into a community. The threat of a wildfire triggers an evacuation, which is not only costly but also highly traumatic.
This same wildfire burns the landscape around the community, with all of the social, ecological and economic implications — which are made even worse by the inevitable post-fire flood. And then it burns all or parts of the community that didn’t meet the FireSmart standard or maintain the standard.
A different strategy would see significant investment in treating the fuels on the landscape adjacent to the community so that in the event of a wildfire, fire behaviour would be mitigated, suppression would be more effective and potential damage would be significantly reduced. With this strategy, even if few homes met the FireSmart standard, many would survive due to greatly reduced fire behaviour and a higher likelihood of initial attack success.
The B.C. government inconsistently mitigates natural disasters. Where flood and earthquake risk is mitigated at the community level (with government footing the bill), the province is mandating that wildfire risk be mitigated at the individual homeowner level — with the homeowner picking up the tab. For flood and earthquake risk, governments routinely deficit-spend to mitigate the risk, while homeowners are expected to spend thousands of dollars to mitigate the risk of a wildfire spreading (in most cases) off public land and onto their property.
A comparable approach would have individual homeowners and businesses spend the money to raise their foundations or put in diking to mitigate flood risk, or anchor their foundations with pilings in the case of earthquake risk. Neither approach makes much sense.
We can’t stop all fires that threaten our homes and communities, but through aggressive fuel management, we can ensure that we deliver fire to our communities that is easier to suppress and less damaging. FireSmart and non-FireSmart homes alike have a greater chance of surviving if the fire approaching the community is a low-intensity surface fire and not a high-intensity crown fire.
However, in order to reduce the cost of wildfires, we have to significantly increase our investment in large-scale fuel treatments.
Robert W. Gray is an Association for Fire Ecology-certified wildland fire ecologist with more than 30 years experience in fire science, management, operations and policy in Canada, the U.S. and overseas.
