Ester Spye finally moved into her new home in October, 14 months after a relentless 2017 wildfire blew through the Ashcroft Indian Band, forcing residents to flee and devouring nine houses.
Spye and her dog Sweets took refuge in a Cache Creek hotel shortly after the July 2017 inferno destroyed their house, and stayed there until it was rebuilt more than a year later.
She is grateful to be back in her community, along with her cat Socks, who was missing for 52 days after the blaze. And she’s grateful for her new home, which has a tin roof and is covered in siding that she was told is fireproof.
But the life-changing experience has left her wary.
“As soon as I see fire, I panic,” she said. “I just really watch for smoke.”
Spye is likely not alone, as she was one of 65,000 evacuees and her home one of 509 buildings burned by the 2017 wildfires, which scorched 12,000 square kilometres of land in B.C. Last year’s forest fires were even more destructive, consuming 13,500 sq. km — although fewer people were evacuated (6,000) and fewer structures lost (158).
These past two summers were the worst wildfire seasons on record and both resulted in a provincial state of emergency being declared. So what should B.C. residents expect this year?
That will depend entirely on the weather this spring and summer: whether it will be cool and rainy or hot with lots of lightning, said University of Alberta professor and wildfire expert Mike Flannigan.
“My guess is it is going to be an active fire season, above normal, but that is a very cautious [guess],” said Flannigan, director of the Edmonton-based Canadian Partnership for Wildland Fire Science.
“You’ve had two record-breaking fire seasons. It’s unusual to get three bad fire seasons in a row, but with the crazy weather and arguably with climate change, I wouldn’t rule it out.”
March was a record-dry month, with Vancouver receiving just a quarter of its average monthly rainfall — and there was even less precipitation in parts of Vancouver Island and the northern Interior, according to the Weather Network.
While spring weather will not necessarily foreshadow the extent of forest fires this summer, the unusually dry March has led to an early start to the 2019 wildfire season. More than 16 fires have ignited in the past week, including two near Kamloops that both grew larger than 100 hectares — one-quarter the size of Stanley Park — and one near Squamish that reached 50 hectares.
These premature blazes continue a worrisome trend that started about two decades ago, said Phil Burton, a professor in the ecosystem science and management program at the University of Northern B.C.
“We are having earlier fire seasons. The mere fact that we are having fires reported in March is in itself different from anything we’ve had in the 1960s, ’70s or ’80s,” said Burton. “We typically think of the fire season as starting with the university students being out of school, the last week of April or the first few weeks of May.”
While the intensity of this coming fire season will be weather dependent, Burton noted this new era of “greater uncertainty” for wildfire activity makes planning by residents very difficult.
“Keep an eye on the weather when it comes to travel plans and any outdoor activities or work scheduling. The possibility of another fire year, whether it’s an average or severe one, can always be a joker in the deck that can require people to change their plans,” he warned.
Many of the most destructive fires in 2017 were near Kamloops and in the Cariboo region, affecting communities such as Williams Lake, 100 Mile House, Princeton, Cache Creek, Ashcroft, Clearwater and Quesnel.
In 2018, there were evacuation orders farther north, including west of Prince George and southeast of Terrace. One of the communities hardest hit was northern B.C.’s Telegraph Creek, home to the Tahltan First Nation, where more than 30 buildings were lost to the flames.
Smoke has been a major concern for two summers in a row and whether it returns this year will depend, in part, on the direction and strength of the winds during any fires, said B.C. Wildfire Service chief fire information officer Kevin Skrepnek.
Over the past two summers, the provincial government grossly outspent its wildfire budgets — by 10 times in 2017, when it cost more than $650 million to fight the fires.
This year, the province is trying to be better prepared for the unknown by nearly doubling its wildfire budget, boosting it from $64 million in 2018 to $101 million.
“We’ve taken a hard look at additional steps we can take to not only prevent wildfires, but also enhance our response on the ground during wildfire season,” Forests Minister Doug Donaldson said last month.
Each summer, the ministry employs about 1,600 firefighters and support crew, and with the new money plans to hire an additional 80 seasonal staff who will be contracted to work longer this summer — for 100 days instead of 80.
One of the recommendations stemming from an independent report into the 2017 wildfire season was for the government to build a stronger working relationship with First Nations when it comes to battling blazes. A First Nations firefighter recruitment strategy has been created, but the ministry could not say this week how many Indigenous workers have been hired or trained so far.
The budget increase “means we can potentially be hiring more staff, we can be doing more projects around — not so much responding to the fires — but preparing for them, mitigating the effects of them, doing prescribed burns, things like that. Those are all going to be expanded now,” Skrepnek said.
The FireSmart program, available online, offers tips for homeowners on how to reduce the chances of their homes going up in smoke. The tips include removing all ignitable items from within 10 metres of your house, such as objects in your gutters, on the roof, under decks and on the ground. Within 10 to 30 metres, coniferous trees should be thinned, and branches, dry grass and needles should be removed from the ground.
An alarming federal climate-change report released last week revealed Canada is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, and concluded that “higher temperatures in the future will contribute to increased fire potential.”
