After eerily similar fires 20 years apart, frustrated experts say advice for Kelowna is much the same | 24CA News
As evening fell over his Kelowna, B.C., house final week, Scott Sieben regarded to the far facet of Okanagan Lake and studied the menacing, orange glow he’d come to acknowledge all too effectively. Nearly 20 years to the day after he’d misplaced his own residence to wildfire, one other one was racing down the opposing hillside and decreasing dozens of properties to ruins.
Then his son James known as.
The McDougall Creek wildfire had jumped from the western fringe of the lake towards James’s house in Lake Country, about 45 kilometres north of Scott’s. James and his companion had been packing up and leaving, simply as his dad and mom had in August 2003.
Two generations, twenty years, two evacuations as wildfire burned via a sizzling summer season evening in mid-August.
“I said, ‘OK, great, make sure you have all your documents and things like you really need and you know feel free to come here and stay,'” Scott Sieben, 58, calmly recalled in an interview.
“Once he was out of the area where the fires were hitting, it was a huge, huge relief for us.”
Experts say the “eerie” similarities between the Okanagan Mountain Park hearth in 2003 and the McDougall Creek wildfire final week are an indication that officers have not carried out sufficient work on hearth prevention and mitigation within the final 20 years, once more leaving B.C. susceptible at a time when local weather change is making fires worse.
What’s “frustrating,” one ecologist stated, is that the recommendation on how you can forestall the subsequent hearth remains to be the identical.
Scott Sieben, who misplaced his house in Kelowna’s Kettle Valley space 20 years in the past, speaks in regards to the bond he constructed along with his neighbours after surviving what was then the worst hearth season in provincial historical past.
Fires ‘behaved very a lot the identical method,’ specialists say
Scott Sieben and his spouse moved into their house within the coveted hillside Kettle Valley subdivision within the spring of 2003, with three-year-old James and his three-month-old sister in tow.
“I was driving around looking for a new home…. There were just tons of swing sets and you know playgrounds, so we decided at that time that it would be a great place for us to bring up our family,” Scott stated.
The Okanagan Mountain Park hearth began close to Rattlesnake Island on Aug. 16, 2003. The Siebens’ house of lower than 4 months was the final of their row to burn seven days later.
“It’s something I would never wish on my worst enemy,” stated Sieben, who can be principal at Mount Boucherie Secondary School in West Kelowna.
“Was it hard to lose some mementos and and lose some memories that we had and you know, some things that we wanted to keep forever and ever? Absolutely it was,” he added.
“But as you know, my wife and I said, ‘We’re safe and our kids are safe.’ And when we talked to all of our neighbours, all of their families were safe too. To me, that’s the greatest, greatest thing.”
James Sieben and his companion evacuated their house and stayed along with his dad, earlier than leaving to Victoria on a pre-planned journey. His house was untouched.
Hundreds of kilometres west, Robert Gray monitored the fireplace’s unfold final week from his house in B.C.’s Fraser Valley. A wildland hearth ecologist of 43 years, Gray noticed similarities from 2003.
“They both behaved very much the same way: Both high intensity, high severity fires and the effects are very similar.
“We have a really dense panorama, we’ve quite a lot of lifeless bushes, numerous gasoline on the forest ground and that’s mainly that is what drives hearth behaviour, that and the climate of the time of the fireplace. So these landscapes have the exact same traits: excessive density, heavy fuels, rugged terrain, steep slopes. And the climate patterns are very related: sizzling, dry, windy circumstances,” he added.
The Okanagan Mountain Park fire is still one of the most well-known fires in B.C. history: it caused $200 million in damage, forced 33,000 people to evacuate their homes and destroyed 239 houses.
The McDougall Creek fire is smaller in size, but still forced more than 10,000 people to flee at its peak and has damaged or destroyed at least 181 properties in West Kelowna, Kelowna, Westbank First Nation and surrounding areas.
For all their similarities, Prof. Mike Flannigan said this year’s fire is part of a more recent pattern.
There are a litany of reasons our fire seasons are getting worse, but climate change is a key factor. The larger, aggressive fires of today are also more likely to burn homes than they were decades ago simply because there are more available to burn.
“There’s clearly been extra growth since 2003. So there’s extra individuals on the panorama, there’s extra companies on the panorama at this time versus 20 years in the past,” said Flannigan, who is a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C.
“It was sort of eerie, the timing,” he added. “I knew the twentieth anniversary was coming after which we noticed issues unfold final Thursday and I believed, ‘Holy crap…. Here we go.'”
The Okanagan Mountain Park forest fire in 2003 destroyed more than 230 homes, caused $200 million in damage and spewed thick smoke into the Okanagan air.
2003 advice still needs to be followed
After 2003, the British Columbia government asked former Manitoba premier Gary Filmon to review the fire season. In his final report, Filmon made 42 recommendations around forest management, emergency response and communication.
The report warned more severe wildfires were in the province’s future if officials didn’t take action to get rid of fuels like seedlings, shrubs and wood debris in forests close to communities — a practice known as prescribed burning, which prevents intense wildfires and replacing them with “extra frequent, well-timed, well-planned low-intensity fires.”
Last year, B.C.’s budget set aside $145 million over three years for Emergency Management B.C. and the B.C. Wildfire Service to launch the province’s transition to a more “proactive strategy” to wildfire preparedness and response.
“For the B.C. Wildfire Service, this marks a transition toward year-round firefighting and risk mitigation,” Finance Minister Selina Robinson advised the B.C. Legislature on the time.
The ministry stated the funding could be used to assist the wildfire service bolster its everlasting, year-round staffing so groups may deal with all elements of emergency administration throughout hearth season — together with prevention and mitigation, preparedness, response and restoration.
In one other report this June, the B.C. Forests Practices Board stated the provincial authorities nonetheless wanted to undertake a “paradigm shift” in its forests administration plan as a result of present threat mitigation plans go away forests “severely vulnerable” to fireplace. Again, that report known as for extra prescribed burns.
24CA News contacted the provincial authorities for touch upon the Filmon suggestions however didn’t obtain a response by deadline.
Preventative spending saves cash, experiences say
Gray and Flannigan stated governments must spend extra on prevention and mitigation, citing research exhibiting prevention to be a worthwhile funding with extra extreme climate within the forecast because of local weather change. In 2019, Public Safety Canada estimated each greenback spent on mitigating future disasters may save roughly $6 in restoration prices down the street.
A U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency report in 2018 discovered Americans saved $6 US for each greenback spent — or $8.13 Cdn.
Two a long time in the past, Filmon agreed.
“Another area of clear consensus was that concentration of resources and effort on issues that anticipate, prevent and prepare for disasters is a better investment than on expenditures made in coping with disasters,” wrote Filmon in his 2004 report.
“We believe that governments have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to implement risk reduction policies and legislation while the devastation of Firestorm 2003 is fresh in the public’s mind and the costs and consequences of various choices are well understood.”
Both Gray and Flannigan stated the consistency in fires is painful.
“Every summer is frustrating. And it’s not just me,” stated Gray, who provided his experience for the Filmon report.
“We watch another disaster unfolding and we certainly hope and pray that no one gets hurt or killed in these things and that all the damage is just homes. Hate to say that, ‘just homes,’ but it’s not people,” he added.
“It’s extreme frustration and it leads to depression and anger. We shouldn’t be in this position again.”
Sieben stated he “never” would’ve thought his son would expertise a wildfire evacuation like his dad and mom did, not to mention seeing that situation practically 20 years later to the day.
“It’s one of those things where where you realize that Mother Nature is really powerful,” he stated.
