B.C. Wildfire crews complete a prescribed burn at Kenna Cartwright Park.

(JENNIFER STAHN / iNFOnews.ca)

Kelowna city council will be meeting with regional Fire Smart groups to discuss future fire safety plans next week. However, it seems as though prescribed burns will not be part of the city's plans. 

Tara Bergeson, urban forestry supervisor for the City of Kelowna, told iNFOnews.ca that as the city is coming off the back of a very involved fire season, it is just now getting back into regular activities. 

“I think this fall we're doing a lot of reflection looking at different programs,” Bergeson said. “I'm working with different organizations and levels of government to reflect on this past wildfire season… and then take those lessons and convert them into application and in how we're running our fire smart program moving forward.”

So far, the city has two key phases planned for its wildfire risk reduction plan. The first part will see the continuation of Kelowna’s Community FireSmart Chipping Program.

The Chipping Program happens annually each May and is designed to provide Kelowna residents with free curb side removal of fire fuels.

“That would be things like cedar hedges, juniper shrubs, dwarf conifer shrubs things like mugo pine as well as pruning’s from our native coniferous trees like ponderosa pine and Douglas fir,” Bergeson said.

The city will also be continually providing home assessments.

The second key Fire Smart initiative will take place at McKinley Mountain Park, where the city will be working with contractors to remove fire fuels and restore historical habitats.

“This is a neat pilot project for us because at the same time will be, through returning the park to more historical stand conditions, also creating more habitat for species at risk in the area and species of interest,” Bergeson said.

The project has been organized in partnership with the province and Environment and Climate Change Canada and will see the removal of excess trees and ladder fuels.

“Historically the stand conditions in this area are very open park land type of forests,” Bergeson said. “Through fire suppression over years and years and years, we've seen a real encroachment and an increase in the number of trees in areas that would have been kind of kept in check by frequent low severity fires. And so, we'll be going in to try to recreate those conditions.”

The city’s fire mitigation plans do not include the use of Indigenous cultural burns or prescribed burns.

“We would love to explore that opportunity at some point in time, but it's not a tool that we have available right now,” Bergeson said.

Dave Gill, general manager at Ntityix Resources LP, a Westbank First Nation-owned company, said prescribed burns and fire fuel mitigation are essential practices, but only part of the solution.

“We have to start managing the fuel in our forests,” Gill told iNFOnews.ca. “That's what we have to start doing more of, otherwise we're going to continue to have these major fires until there's really nothing left to burn anymore.”

Westbank First Nation, Gill and his team have been working alongside the City of West Kelowna for almost a decade to do fire mitigation work and occasionally prescribed burns in the First Nation’s community forest area bordering Peachland and West Kelowna.

Gill said the mitigation work is important and necessary, yet expensive and time consuming.

“We did some mitigation work in West Kelowna and the 2021 Mount Law fire that came through actually ran into the mitigated area,” Gill said. “And when it did so, it was effective in bringing a crown fire to the ground and making it easier to fight. So, the treatments are effective.”

Although the company has received full support from the City of West Kelowna, prescribed burns have been very minimal this year.

“We've only had one prescribed burn this year and that was on West Bank First Nation's reserve land out by Gallagher's Canyon,” Gill said. “We did a prescribed burn out there this spring and that's been our only prescribed fire this year.”

Venting requirements prove a constant issue and have influenced Ntityix Resources’s ability to carry out prescribed burns.

“We have to have the right venting to do this kind of work, otherwise the air quality is affected and nobody's happy when that happens," he said. "So venting is always a concern and would be a limiting factor on when you can burn.”

However, the intensity of this year’s fire was almost impossible to stop, Gill said. Huge scale mitigation work would have been necessary to prevent it.

“The only way that you can do something is at the landscape level on a much larger scale by thinning the forest out a little bit and reducing the amount of fuel which will reduce the intensity of those fires,” he said. “So yeah, it's going to take many years and many dollars to make it work."

The approach to fire mitigation needs to be broader and inclusive of people within the community, he said. 

“I think one of the important things is for people within city limits is to understand the whole concept of FireSmart and preparing their property for potential wildfire,” Gill said. “The FireSmart program is very well known. All municipalities and cities know about it. It's just a matter of ensuring that the residents are fire smarting their individual properties as well.”

More information about Kelowna’s Community FireSmart Chipping Program can be found here.

More information about Ntityix Resources LP can be found on their website here.

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