The wildfire cleared a clear path to a Canadian lakeside tourist spot in British Columbia, with a population of 222,000.
The fire raged across the city of Kelowna for 19 days and consumed 976 acres of forest. But on the outskirts of the suburbs, it encountered a fire prevention zone and spluttered, leaving only one house on fire.
The fire prevention zone – an area carefully cleared to remove fuel and minimize the spread of flames – was created by a logging company owned by a local indigenous community. And as another wildfire has ravaged the suburb of West Kelowna this month, its history with the previous one – the 2021 Mount Law fire – offers a valuable lesson: a well-placed and well-built fire prevention zone can, under the right conditions, protect homes and saving lives.
It’s a lesson not only for Kelowna, but for a growing number of places in Canada and elsewhere threatened by increasing wildfires due to climate change.
“When you consider how wildfire seasons go, if we invested more in proactive wildfires, we would need fewer reactive wildfires,” said Kira Hoffman, a wildfire researcher at the University of British Columbia. “We probably won’t see the effects of much of this mitigation and treatment for the next 10 to 20 years. But then we really need it.”
Wildfires are an essential part of the natural cycle of forests, but in recent years more and more wildfires have become so large that containment is virtually impossible. Fire prevention zones – created out of season – can help delay approaching fires so people can escape, and can also allow firefighters to gain control of some areas.
The creation of these zones is being greeted with renewed interest in parts of Canada, including the western provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. Interest has peaked in particular among indigenous communities, who have been hardest hit by the country’s wildfires.
Ten times as many acres burned in Canada this year as in the entire past fire season, sending smoke to southern Georgia and eastern Europe at times. The current fire in West Kelowna has hit areas where there are no fire prevention zones, seizing 110 buildings and upsetting the lives of approximately 30,000 evacuees in the area.
In contrast, the 50-acre fireproof zone starved the 2021 blaze, allowing firefighters to suppress it and keep it away from homes.
The logging company, Ntityix Development, that created this fire prevention zone made partial use of traditional indigenous forestry practices, including thinning the forest; cleaning up dirt on the floor; and burning the debris and bedding in a controlled manner to prevent it from becoming fuel for wildfires – an act once banned by the provincial government.
“This was the first test of all the work we’ve done and to me it shows that it’s working,” said Dave Gill, general manager of forestry at Westbank First Nation-owned Ntityix Development, walking a few weeks before the This year’s fire broke out through the still largely intact forest. “It certainly held back progress.”
Ntityix’s strategy helps slow fires by reducing the flammability of forests engulfed by airborne embers, the main way wildfires spread, said Dr. Hoffman, a former wildfire firefighter.
In 2015, six years before the Mount Law fire threatened Kelowna, Mr. Gill began creating the fire prevention zone called the Glenrosa Project, named after a wooded neighborhood in West Kelowna. An important goal was to prevent fires on the forest floor.
“If you have a fire and it’s on a surface, it’s quite easy to control or fight,” said Mr Gill. “But once it gets into the crowns, it’s game over.”
The project also retained mature trees with thick, fire-resistant bark and only harvested less valuable but more flammable saplings – a reversal of common forestry practice.
Prior to coming to Ntityix, Mr. Gill, who is not Indigenous, had a decades-long career in government, as well as commercial forestry and consulting firms.
He said the First Nation elders, who assigned him to manage the forest within a 120-year timeline, and his native colleagues have changed the way he thinks about the forest. “We leave the trees with the most timber value,” said Mr Gill. “With this, we’re trying to introduce a different paradigm to the way you look at the forest, not just putting dollar signs on trees.”
After thinning out the forest, Ntityix crews completed the project in 2016 by pruning the bottom 10 to 10 feet of the remaining trees’ branches so they don’t become a ladder for the fire to climb. The debris collected from the forest floor was broken up and hauled away by truck or burned.
In the logging areas, Ntityix does not clearcut, which is standard industry practice, but uses selective logging and leaves the stands of fire-resistant deciduous trees intact.
While billions of dollars have been spent putting out Canadian wildfires — British Columbia alone has spent nearly 1 billion Canadian dollars in 2021 — funding for measures to make forests less hospitable to flames has generally been modest. Also, the value of such measures has not yet been fully embraced by everyone in the Canadian forestry community.
While more mitigation efforts are needed, their overall effectiveness is undermined by the increasing intensity and size of wildfires, says Mike Flannigan, a wildfire scientist at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia.
“When things get extreme, the fire will do what the fire will do,” he said. “Unless you treat 40 percent of the landscape, it’s not going to work because the fire just goes around it or jumps over it.”
Dr. However, Hoffman is less pessimistic, saying that not enough large-scale risk reduction has been attempted to judge its effectiveness.
“There’s not a lot of economic incentive to do what Ntityix did,” said Dr. Hoffman. “It’s not really sexy to go and get six-inch pines out of the woods.”
The measures taken by Ntityix and other companies, many of which are owned by First Nations communities or their members, are labor intensive and costly. The company has committed $100,000 a year to carry out a variant of its work that involves turning logging roads into wildfire mitigation zones, a process likely to take decades.
Craig Moore – a member of the Syilx Okanagan Nation, in British Columbia – is also a former municipal firefighter and owner of a forest firefighting company.
During an interview at his company, Rider Ventures, in Vernon, British Columbia, he recalled how his efforts delayed a 2021 fire in the province. Mr Moore said after that the wildfire ranking in the area fell from 6 – the most serious on the list. county scale – to 2, giving firefighters the chance to save 500 homes.
“Having water and trees are our greatest things,” said Mr. Moore, standing in the middle of a forest where his company had operated. “If we lose that, we will all go down pretty quickly.”