We had our first campfire of the summer last weekend, just as summer ended and the ban we’d been under since July 6 was finally lifted, and two weeks after a province-wide state of emergency ended.
It was a good campfire, with s’mores and the whole works.
I live on a property that’s a perfect example of what firefighters call the interface. There’s the clearing where the house sits, but aside from that it’s a forest. That has some advantages. It’s peaceful and scenic, and I get most of my winter firewood from storm-downed trees or through selective harvesting.
For most of my life on the Sunshine Coast, my biggest worry looking out at those big firs, gnarly hemlocks and the few towering pines, has been whether they might come down in a storm and hit the house, knock out the power, or block the driveway. All those things have happened to us, and to friends and family over the years.
It’s still hard to look out at the forest in my backyard and picture it in flames, even though it’s dotted with burned-out spars from a fire more than a century ago.
I had a chance to talk this summer with SCRD emergency program coordinator Bill Elsner and some of the local firefighters who went to the Interior to aid those communities during the wildfire emergency. The conversations kept coming back to the FireSmart Home Owners Manual.
It’s only 16 pages, with lots of pictures, and after reading it for the first time since the 2015 wildfire near Sechelt, I’m looking out at my personal chunk of the forest and thinking seriously about whether I need to manage it – and the rest of my property – better.
Fall, while we’re outside harvesting the squash and getting the garden ready to overwinter, is the perfect time for those of us living in the interface to take a look around our houses.
It would take years of work to get my property to meet all the benchmarks in the FireSmart Home Owners Manual, but there’s still a lot I could do to check off a few of them this fall. If you live on a lot with few trees, it’s a much easier job.
Our local and provincial governments also have a task on the to-do list. The Filmon report on the 2003 Kelowna fires, and the resulting Strategic Wildfire Prevention Initiative, called for the creation of Community Wildfire Protection Plans in areas where interface fires are a risk. The Sunshine Coast’s is still in the works and, although the province offers support and funding, there’s more it can do to support communities as they implement those plans. After the summer B.C. just went through, I’m curious to see if anything turns up in the new government’s budget next February.
The FireSmart Home Owners manual is available at bcwildfire.ca/prevention.
