Good morning. Wendy Cox in Vancouver this morning.
Well before this summer of fire, the BC Wildfire Service was making tentative steps to bring ferociously independent, self-organized wildfire fighting groups into the fold.
Reporter Nancy Macdonald spent part of this past week in the North Shuswap, where some rural residents have steadfastly refused to abide with evacuation orders. Instead, people like the Bischoffs, the Crawfords and the Allgaier’s have stayed behind to battle the flames on their own. Covered in sweat and soot, they’ve spent exhausting hours, working in organized teams.
They are unperturbed and unmoved by warnings that they are defying a legal order to not be there. Emergency Management Minister Bowinn Ma was direct: “Evacuation orders must be followed.”
Fire information officer Mike McCulley said provincial firefighting resources in the North Shuswap have been deployed to the areas where they will have the biggest impact. Even though they may not be visible to residents, they are working “really hard … out on these big flanks, distant from where you are, but where the risk to your property is most.”
He said those that defy evacuation orders to fight the fires themselves are not only putting themselves at risk of the flames, but also at risk of getting in the way of aerial firefighting efforts.
“When we have public or unknown people roaming through our work force or areas or evacuation orders, sometimes we have to stop operations because it is just not safe. And when we stop operations, we’re losing ground on containment,” he said. “So it might not seem like a big deal, but when people are underneath our helicopters and we’re trying to work, we have to sometimes stop. And so that can be a really big impact on holding a fire in place.”
But Dave Dyck, who owns a small farm near Celista, a small logging community that swells every summer when lakeside vacationers arrive from Calgary and Vancouver, is among those in the area who believe their efforts have made the difference between losing their homes and farms and saving them.
He said the Bush Creek East Wildfire has been a terrifying thing to behold.
“It was like a nuclear bomb went off. You can’t imagine the heat, the noise. It was raining fire. The flames were 400 feet in the air,” he told Nancy.
“I had a dump truck with a 3,000-litre fuel water tank and a pump. All night, we were running around, putting spot fires out.”
Efforts like Dyck’s have been mostly been unwelcome by the BC Wildfire Service. While Australia relies on about 200,000 volunteers to battle its summer bushfires, B.C. depends on teams flown in from Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and elsewhere in Canada to fight increasingly frequent and violent fires every summer.
BC Wildfire Service has had to confront those defying evacuation orders in successive wildfire seasons. There were refuseniks in 2021 in Monte Lake and south of Francois Lake in 2018.
But those people, and the ones that spoke to Nancy, aren’t the same as the angry protesters earlier this week who confronted RCMP at a highway checkpoint and spouted conspiracy theories, arguing the Mounties had no authority to block people from entering evacuation zones. BC Wildfire Services pulled resources out of the area in part due to the protest, arguing the tension between local residents and fire officials put its teams in danger.
Rather, the residents that spoke to Nancy this week lamented the lack of ability to coordinate with provincial teams.
BC Wildfire Service is listening. In the aftermath of the 2021 and 2018 fires, community groups there self-organized, signing up for government-recognized courses in wildfire suppression and safety, creating call-lists of volunteers and procuring equipment such as water tanks, pumps and hoses to bolster the cache that many already had from decades of tending to the land as farmers, ranchers and loggers. The groups established lines of communication with their local fire centres, expressing their desire to be involved, and explaining what they can offer.
Now, when wildfire reaches those communities, the groups work alongside the BCWS as contractors, sharing local knowledge of the area, putting out small fires before they grow and assisting with mop-up duties. The arrangement has helped to defuse tensions between government and community.
Fire Information Officer Forrest Tower said the success of partnerships like these boils down to good communication, advance planning, and basic requirements including minimum-level firefighter training and an organizational structure.
“It is possible, but it does take a little bit of work before there’s a fire,” he said in an interview Thursday.
This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.
Wendy Cox