Just half an hour from downtown Victoria, John Dean Provincial Park is an oasis.
Towering cedars and Douglas fir sway in the wind rushing up Mount Newton. Craggy Garry oaks look like something out of Tolkien. Ferns and moss-covered rocks paint the forest floor in shades of green.
Monday morning, the only sounds came from at least five species of birds simultaneously competing for air time in an otherwise silent Eden.
“It’s a tinderbox,” says Edo Nyland.
If a fire ever catches hold in this park, heaven help the Saanich Peninsula, the octogenarian says.
“It’s going to be one hell of a monstrous fire.” And no, it won’t stop at the 430-acre park’s boundaries, he says. There’s timber all the way up the peninsula, mixed in with homes in what in modern parlance is referred to as the rural-urban interface. “John Dean park has all those multimillion-dollar houses right against it.”
Nyland, a former North Saanich councillor, knows the park intimately. In 1984, after retiring to the Peninsula from the Yukon, where he was the territory’s chief forester for 11 years, he was in on the founding of the Friends of John Dean Park, an organization he led for 18 years.
But others who also know John Dean well are less worried. Sure, fire is a concern, they say, but no more so than in any of the other provincial parks or CRD parks south of the Malahat.
As with any of those parks, it’s a matter of placing the threat in perspective, they say. Just because a devastating fire could happen doesn’t mean it will happen. It’s hard to forget the Kelowna fire of 2003, when a wind-driven blaze that began in Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park burned more than 230 homes, but it’s not as though such catastrophes occur every year.
Still, the Fort McMurray fire, along with the Burns Bog blaze that sent clouds of smoke billowing into the sky south of Vancouver this week, has many people paying more attention to the dangers that exist where wild land meets populated areas.
If a fire were to start in John Dean Park it would be up to the provincial government’s B.C. Wildfire Service, not North Saanich’s fire department, to respond, though the latter would get called in if houses were threatened. (The municipal firefighters are trained to handle structure blazes, not forest fires, while the opposite is true of the wildfire branch.)
At the wildfire centre in Parksville, they say fires that threaten people or their property get priority. Generally, those near populated areas are reported earlier (two dozen callers phoned about one near Pemberton last week) which makes it easier to get on top of them. In the case of John Dean Park, helicopters could be summoned from the fire base at Cobble Hill, among other places.
Everyone agrees that prevention is the best firefighting tool, though that means different things to different people. Nyland would like to see more firebreaks on the Peninsula (the airport is a wonderful one, he says). He wants stricter building standards, too — fireproof sundecks, no more cedar shingles, that sort of thing.
In North Saanich, new fire chief John Trelford said the Alberta experience has inspired residents to pay more attention to fire safety. “Fort Mac has shown everybody.”
Trelford points to the province’s online FireSmart Homeowners Manual (just Google it) as a good place for individuals to go for advice on how they can help themselves. It talks about such things as which siding material is best (stucco, metal, brick, concrete, cement fibre), how far to keep trees from a house (at least 10 metres) and what types of trees are less flammable (deciduous).
Meanwhile, if you haven’t been to John Dean Park for a while, haven’t tromped along the six kilometres of trail that wind through the forest, give your soul a treat and go.
Just leave your smokes at home.
