The McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside above lakefront homes in West Kelowna, B.C., on Aug. 18, 2023.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Wildfires are not just a problem for rural areas. They’re increasingly a problem for cities, but the scale of the threat doesn’t appear to be sinking in.
After the small Alberta community of Slave Lake burned in 2011, local fire crews were eager to share lessons they’d learned. By the time much bigger Fort McMurray burned five years later, they hadn’t found a lot of people willing to listen.
Fast forward to 2023, when fire crews in Halifax lacked proper training, equipment and experience to tackle a blaze in the city’s outskirts.
Those sorts of areas – partly rural and often heavily wooded, they’re called the “wildland urban interface” – pose the greatest wildfire risk to cities. It’s there that municipal crews more accustomed to doing medical calls and tackling house fires face profound new challenges.
A recent report from the nation’s fire chiefs makes clear just how unprepared many crews are for that challenge.
Its survey of fire departments reveals that only 18 per cent of those that responded have received the funding or equipment needed to tackle wildfires. One third don’t have access to adequate training dedicated to fighting wildfires. And about one third of fire departments have not been able to fulfill mutual-aid agreements that allow jurisdictions to pool firefighting resources.
The report did not have an answer for why mutual aid agreements could not be fulfilled. But it’s not hard to imagine a link between a lack of resources, a lack of training and an inability to help.
This should be a wake-up call.
Although the 2023 fire season may not be top of mind as winter settles in, the threat is not gone. The incidence and severity of wildfires may fluctuate from year to year, but the long-term trends are increasingly grim. Climate change is creating the conditions for fire seasons to get worse. In simple terms, a warmer forest is drier and more likely to ignite. When it does, it burns hotter and bigger.
As Canada both warms and its cities continue to build in the wildland urban interface, this scenario is likely to recur in particularly dangerous ways.
The fire chiefs warn in their report that more trucks are needed, because so much equipment is being used to respond to climate-related emergencies. They also expect the number of people doing double-duty fighting both forest fires and urban blazes “to increase as the wildland urban interface increases.”
This is dangerous and vital work. Firefighters cannot be asked to do it without proper resources.
The report makes the case that the federal government should contribute. But while Ottawa could play a coordinating role, outside of national parks wildfires are the responsibility of provinces and territories. And spending by these governments on fire control has been mixed.
British Columbia invested after record-breaking fires ravaged the province in 2017. Annual spending is up four times and the province has established a year-round, rather than seasonal, firefighting service, in part to tackle so-called zombie fires that can smoulder through the off-season and flare up unexpectedly.
Over the same period, Alberta has cut fire budgets and reduced lookout numbers and firefighter capabilities.
Regional shortfalls can to some degree be papered over. It would be ruinously expensive for every jurisdiction to budget for the worst-case scenario, so provinces share resources as needed. But that approach is being strained. In 2023, Canada had to borrow firefighters from a dozen foreign countries, using crews from as far away as South Korea. This year was less severe – notwithstanding the devastation in Jasper, Alta. – but the country still had all domestic resources committed for six weeks of the summer.
When blazes threaten cities, municipal fire departments are also pressed into action. Provinces must give them the resources and training to do so.
Firefighters can also learn from each other. In his book Fire Weather, on the blaze that destroyed part of Fort McMurray, John Vaillant notes that crews transformed within hours from a hierarchical organization to a loose collection of people simply doing the best they could.
That kind of ad hoc response is clearly no longer acceptable. Ottawa, the provinces and municipalities need to organize themselves for what’s to come.