Introduction In for one hell of a ride
July 7, 2017, is a day many British Columbians will never forget. A day like no other—unprecedented, they say. Mayor John Ranta was standing on his front lawn in Cache Creek when he saw fire aiming straight for him. Andra Holzapfel noticed smoke curling over a mountain and heading toward her just after she had unpacked her canoe in Bowron Lake Provincial Park. Flying south in a Twin Otter from Fort St. John, Jeremy Sieb noted smoke columns at Otter Lake, Dragon Mountain and south of Quesnel on the west side of the Fraser River. Chief Francis Laceese saw plumes on his way from Kamloops to the Toosey First Nation in Riske Creek. In the Walmart parking lot in Williams Lake, Raylene Poffenroth snapped photographs of several fires erupting on the horizon. Kurt Van Ember witnessed lightning strikes as he was driving west along Highway 20. “We are going to be in for one hell of a ride,” he said. The fires descended like a pride of dragons, roaring and snorting. They were fast-moving and everywhere. The BC Wildfire Service was stretched to the limit and didn’t even get to all the fires reported.
The Elephant Hill, Hanceville–Riske Creek and Plateau Complex fires started on July 7. They stormed across British Columbia, growing ever larger, seemingly unstoppable. Glen Burgess, an incident commander for several fires, told me during an interview at the Kamloops Fire Centre, “Ideally on a fire, you go in and you take action and you put it out. But when a fire is a hundred kilometres long by seventy kilometres wide, you can’t have people on every inch of that. The growth was so volatile and there were times we couldn’t put our people out there. We had to let these fires do their thing. When the smoke is thick and it’s heavy, you can’t fly aircraft. You can’t operate safely. And really it’s about Mother Nature at that point.” The Plateau fire was the largest single fire in the province’s history. It eventually extended over 545,000 hectares and came to within 60 kilometres of Quesnel. By the time these dragons gasped their last, they had consumed a total of 1.2 million hectares—that’s 1.3 percent of BC, an area more than twice the size of PEI and slightly bigger than Lebanon.1
Summer fires are a familiar occurrence in British Columbia. They have scored and shaped the province, causing devastation as well as renewal. Our natural spaces have developed through exposure to fires, and many of our plants and animals are exquisitely adapted to them. Lodgepole pines depend on heat for their seeds to germinate, a phenomenon called “pyriscence.” Their cones are sealed with a resin that melts when exposed to fire and then the seeds are released. Fireweed and huckleberries flourish on the sites of burned forests, taking advantage of the extra nutrients in the ashy soil and the additional sunshine available due to tree loss.
Fire beetles fly eagerly toward forest fires to mate and deposit their eggs under the bark of smouldering trees. Dying trees are hospitable environments for the beetles because they no longer secrete the juicy resins healthy trees use to flush out invading insects.2 Woodpeckers follow the beetles, attracted by their succulence. Bears, which are opportunistic omnivores, arrive somewhat later when food sources such as huckleberries get established. And deer come, lured by the lush meadows that eventually grow in the new clearings.
People, too, have used landscape fires to serve their own ends. Historians have found evidence dating back to the 1700s of First Nations in the Pacific Northwest burning for various purposes—among other things, to make clearings around their villages, to create pasture for their horses and game, and to make space for growing medicinal herbs and food. According to forester John Parminter, they relied on fires to promote the cultivation of at least eighteen different species of plants.3 Sometimes these burns escaped, but for the most part the Indigenous people had techniques to control them. The result was a patchwork of forest and grassland, resistant to catastrophic fires.
New settlers, prospectors and lumbermen also set fires, on occasion quite carelessly. In 1915, H.R. MacMillan, who was Chief Forester at the time and later one of BC’s most famous lumber barons, observed:
Forest fires began with the heroes of the Northwestern and the Hudson’s Bay Company, who burned their way through Tete Jaune, down the Canoe, the Columbia, the Thompson, and through Cassiar, Cariboo, and Atlin; again in 1860 the forests blazed, lighting the way of the placer miners up the Fraser, the Kootenay, and a hundred other streams. The prospectors who uncovered the mines of the Boundary District wrecked the forests of the region. During the first sixty years every valley has felt the effects of fire; in this period the Province of British Columbia has lost by fire about seven hundred billion feet of merchantable timber, more than now exists in the whole of Canada, enough to supply the whole Canadian domestic and export demand for over one hundred years. There is no record in history of such a loss as the fire loss of British Columbia during the past two generations.4
To prevent such destruction, BC passed the first Bush Fire Act in 1874. It set penalties for people who let fires break away and damage Crown land or private property.5 When MacMillan was hired as Chief Forester in 1912, the BC Forest Branch was established to further protect the timber resources of the province.6 One of its mandates was to put out fires. By the early 1930s, the BC Forest Branch had put a stop to most traditional landscape burning7 and by the 1940s, the province was committed to fire suppression in a big way. Aided by aircraft (sometimes repurposed military planes) and a network of fire lookouts, the BC Forest Service, as it was called by then, became much better at putting out blazes. In 1995, it split into two organizations. One, still called the BC Forest Service, looked after the stewardship of our woods; the other, the BC Wildfire Service, took on the prevention and extinction of fires.8 With headquarters in Victoria and Kamloops, it now has six regional centres, each divided into smaller zones—thirty-two in total.
Despite all this, in 2003, BC got a wake-up call. That summer was remarkably hot and dry, and more than twenty-five hundred fires started in the Interior. Many were “interface fires”—that is, they affected communities as well as forests. Some settlements were hit for the first time. The initial interface fire broke out on July 22 at Chilco Lake and the last one on August 20 at Radium.9 During that fire season, the worst BC had ever seen, 334 homes were destroyed, 45,000 people were evacuated and 260,000 hectares were burned.10
In October 2003, Premier Gordon Campbell asked Gary Filmon, the former premier of Manitoba, to investigate what could be done to prevent such disasters. Filmon heard hundreds of submissions and made numerous recommendations. In his report, released in the spring of 2004, he urged BC to initiate a program to clear some of the flammable underbrush from the forest floor.11 The province determined that 1.7 million hectares needed treatment. Of those, 685,000 hectares were at especially high risk of fires.12
On March 3, 2016, during a sitting of the BC Legislature, MLA Harry Bains questioned Steve Thompson, the Minister of Forests, about the program to remove forest debris. Thompson admitted that just 80,000 hectares had received attention. Bains persisted:
So 80,000 out of 685,000, and we are talking about since 2004. You’re looking at 12 years to treat 8 percent—rough and dirty—of what was considered to be high risk by the Filmon report. We are going year by year, and 12 years later, we’re still sitting at 8 percent. If you go at this rate, you’re looking at 100 years to fix this. I mean, that’s the reality.13
In 2017, slightly over a year after this exchange, a fire season began, the likes of which British Columbia had never seen. Aside from government inaction on the Filmon report, a number of factors were to blame. Global warming had come to the Cariboo during the twentieth century and average temperatures had increased by 1°C.14 This shift was enough to provoke a cascade of damaging effects that made fires much more likely and more dangerous. Hot, arid summers created tinder-dry forests. Higher temperatures caused more powerful storms, which blew down more trees, which in turn provided more ready fuel. They also increased the likelihood of lightning. Every 1°C of warming boosts the number of lightning strikes by 12 percent.15 And, of course, strong winds are capable of fanning flames into raging infernos that are difficult to extinguish. As incident commander Glen Burgess put it, “We cannot stop these fires, not at that point. You have to pull back.”
In addition, the changing climate created favourable conditions for the mountain pine beetle epidemic, which began in the early 2000s, peaked in 2004 and lasted until 2012.16 Before that, spells of −40°C winter weather lasting several weeks had kept the beetle population in check. But when those frigid periods no longer occurred, the beetles spread over 18 million hectares, and left half our pines dead in their wake.17 Though some of the dead trees were salvaged and removed, most remained in place, adding even more to the fuel load.18
BC’s forest management practices compounded the problems created by global warming. Our zealous fire suppression efforts since the 1940s had unintended consequences, as forests became denser and flammable brush accumulated on the ground.
A number of scientists have been documenting changes in the incidence of fires in BC by looking at the stories that tree rings tell. René Alfaro writes, “Dating of fire scars in the Cariboo-Chilcotin Plateau of central British Columbia indicated that fires were much less frequent in the 20th century than they were in the 19th century.”19 Lori Daniels and Wesley Brooke studied the Alex Fraser Forest in the 140 Mile area. They examined tree rings going back to 1619, when King James I was on the English throne. Twenty-two fires occurred from 1619 to 1943, but none after that.20 The accumulation of incendiary materials increased the probability that when fires did break out they would be larger, hotter and more aggressive. In 2017, forests monitored by both the Cariboo and the Kamloops Fire Centres had, on average, three times more fuel available for combustion than they had from 1996 to 2005, and well above the levels in 2003 and 2010, in themselves notable fire seasons.21
In addition, BC’s silvaculture has relied heavily on one species. “Single-species planting of lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia) following clear-cut logging or wildfire has been common throughout interior British Columbia,” forestry consultant Jean Roach writes. Pines are fast-growing and desirable so they were cultivated even outside their traditional range.22 Because they were planted after clear-cuts, the resulting stands were mostly uniform in age. Years of fire suppression ensured that these cohorts grew to be quite mature, but the older they were, the more vulnerable they were to the pine beetle. Many trees became susceptible all at the same time. Yes, global warming contributed to the epidemic, but so did clear-cutting and species selection. We helped to create the conditions needed for an outbreak, which in turn put our woods in danger of mega-fires.
On July 7, 2017, the stage was set. It only takes one spark to start a blaze, and a plethora of sparks hit BC when a ferocious thunderstorm cut a wide swath through the province’s Interior. A total of 138 fires started that day, and at 9:30 in the evening, Todd Stone, the Minister of Transportation, declared a provincial state of emergency.
Like many British Columbians, I was glued to the news about the fires. I worried about our summer place at Sheridan Lake, which had been in my husband’s family for sixty years. Some people’s houses were destroyed half an hour after they first saw flames, and I didn’t think we were particularly well-prepared for fires that volatile. I was concerned about my friends and neighbours too. I knew how many of them loved their homes and cottages and how, in some families, the attachment to a ranch or lake went back for generations.
Certainly there were losses, but as the summer went on, I also came across wonderful stories about how people coped in trying circumstances. I thought we could learn lessons from them about the importance of community—apparent in so many ways. British Columbians looked after strangers who had no place to go. They helped each other rescue and shelter animals. They pooled information. I wanted to share what I had learned, so I began to collect anecdotes for a book. I liked the idea of being a conduit for the people whose voices I heard—for those who lost their homes and cottages, for those who were evacuated and displaced, for those who fought the fires raging around them, and for those who watched helplessly from the sidelines.
I spoke to ranchers, cottagers, First Nations people, RCMP members, evacuees, store and resort owners, search and rescue officers, firefighters, mayors, park rangers, pilots and volunteers. I was often able to see events from several perspectives. And I discovered the as-yet-untold story of how Williams Lake was saved.
Many people allowed me to have glimpses into their lives and I saw how they met disaster head-on. They were brave, resourceful and kind. Among other things, this book is a tribute to their generous spirit.