Fire crews work to put out hot spots in the Maligne Lodge in Jasper, Alta., on July 26.AMBER BRACKEN/The Canadian Press
Glenn McGillivray is managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction and adjunct professor of disaster and emergency management at York University.
In the hours after the May 2016 wildfire loss in Fort McMurray, Alta., a prominent Canadian wildfire researcher said on national news that the fire would “change everything.”
Several years later, it is clear that it changed very little.
In the disaster risk reduction research field, we always look for that event that shakes old belief systems and drives “permanent positive change,” i.e. that loss that finally pushes decision makers to take a definitive set of actions that will make big differences going forward.
Could the Jasper fire spur change?
While home – whether it is Slave Lake, Alta., Fort McMurray, Alta., Lytton, B.C., Tantallon, N.S., West Kelowna, B.C., Shuswap B.C. or Enterprise, NWT – will always hold a special place in the hearts of those who were born there or live there now, Jasper is a bit different.
Social media posts are rife with comments from heartbroken Canadians from across the country who hold Jasper near and dear to them. Many visited there during childhood family vacations, while others recall recent visits where they escaped urban life, got grounded in nature, and remembered the things in life that are most important.
Similar sentiments are coming in from elsewhere in the world, both from expats and visitors who have spent time in Jasper. Many are calling it a “national treasure.”
Will these sentiments drive at least some permanent and positive changes in the way we address wildfire management – including risk reduction – in this country going forward?
One thing that Jasper has done is it has underscored the weakness of what I call the “outward-in” philosophy of protecting communities from wildfire, i.e. where we begin off in the wildlands reducing forest fuel and move inward toward the community, stopping at its edge. The hope is that while fire still may occur, that it won’t be as intense and won’t cause ember storms in town that ignite buildings.
The newer thinking is that while, yes, reducing fuel in wildlands is important, so, too, is making our communities less flammable. When embers enter town and ignite man-made items (like homes and vehicles), the event stops being a wildland fire and begins anew as an urban conflagration.
So the message is don’t just work from the forest inward, but also work from structures outward.
We know how to do this, and FireSmart Canada – the country’s premiere wildfire risk reduction program – has lead the way. FireSmart has recently been awarded significant federal funding to help take it from being primarily B.C. and Alberta-centric, to expand its reach and become a truly national wildfire mitigation program.
As both the number and intensity of wildfires increase, structures themselves will more often serve as the very last line of defence during wildfire events like the one in Jasper. In a sense, our buildings shouldn’t be considered as what is laid bare when the castle wall has been breached, they need to be part of the battlements, too.
Whereas “heroic” firefighting has often saved the day in many past wildland urban interface fires (we dodged several bullets this year and last, think Labrador City, Fort Nelson, and Yellowknife), often very extreme events like Jasper mean that the best you can do is get people out of the way.
Reports from officials on the ground in Jasper describe a very fast moving, high intensity crown fire that was well beyond the capability of any type of wildfire suppression capability. The conditions that led to large losses in Jasper, several of which will be found to be linked to climate change when the attribution research is done, combined in such a way that wildland firefighters and air attack crews couldn’t catch a break.
And this is the problem when you get extremes of the extreme – many of the old “standbys” don’t work. This will happen more and more as we continue to warm our climate.
Despite poisonous social media rhetoric, there is no one reason or one person to blame for the loss in Jasper, but we all have a responsibility to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
And more and more, this will require upturning old conventions.