A former Parks Canada wildfire expert believes more work needs to be done to protect the Banff townsite from wildfire, including more prescribed burns, additional thinning and wider fuel breaks to help slow down an advancing fire.
A former Parks Canada wildfire expert believes more work needs to be done to protect the Banff townsite from wildfire, including more prescribed burns, additional thinning and wider fuel breaks to help slow down an advancing fire.
Cliff White, who had a 37-year career with Parks Canada and was one of the pioneers of the agency's prescribed fire plan, said the biggest fire threat to Banff comes from the west or southwest, where the forest continues to age and thicken.
“This can only lead to a massive mountain pine beetle infestation, resulting in large areas of forest mortality,” said White, a former fire and vegetation specialist in Banff and national fire officer in Ottawa. “Then comes the inevitable severe, mid-summer wildfires that escape initial attack during a drought year.”
White said Parks Canada and the Town of Banff, to their credit, have led the way in preparing for a wildfire, including reducing fuels by thinning dense forests and doing prescribed burns.
He said fuel breaks have been built around many facilities in the past two decades, but he said these narrow strips of tree removal do not mitigate the wildfire risk at a larger landscape level.
“They only provide emergency action lines that can fail in extreme conditions,” said White.
To reduce forest biomass and age-related tree mortality, White suggests Parks Canada widen existing fuel breaks and maintain them every year, perhaps through training exercises with municipal, provincial and federal fire crews.
“They need to use these as anchor lines to remove larger patches of dense forests with thinning and controlled fire at a rate that at least matches the long-term natural disturbance rates,” he said.
“This can be done in spring and fall when the risk of a valley-wide inferno is minimal.”
The devastating Fort McMurray wildfire, which forced the evacuation of more than 80,000 people and destroyed about 2,400 buildings, has led many land managers and municipalities to rethink their fire readiness plans.
Latest estimates now put the wildfire at approximately 522,894 hectares on the Alberta side, and another 2,496 hectares across the border into Saskatchewan. That's more than the total area burned throughout all of Alberta last year.
The effects of global warming on temperature, precipitation levels, and soil moisture are turning many forests into kindling - and fires in North America are expected to burn more frequently, with more intensity and become increasingly unpredictable.
White, who played an integral role in revolutionizing the role of prescribed fires in national parks, said the long-term natural fire disturbance for the Bow Valley is about one to two per cent of the landscape per year.
He said this burning rate dropped to nearly nothing when fire suppression began about 1920.
“Even with more enlightened policies, Parks Canada has matched the natural forest rejuvenation rate only three times in the last 30 years with prescribed fires,” said White, referring to the 1994 Sawback Range fire, the 2003 Fairholme burn and one in the Spray Valley in 2008.
“They haven't been burning as much in recent years and the fuels are accumulating.”
White said Sulphur Mountain is one of the biggest problem areas for the Banff townsite, even though there has been some fuel reduction work on the slopes of the mountain throughout the years.
He said an out-of-control wildfire would sweep up the southwest slopes of Sulphur and the updraft would release burning embers that would shower down on the townsite and adjacent developments.
“The scary part is Sulphur Mountain is just upwind and has trees to the very top of the mountain and the forest is aging. It's like a dormant volcano, quietly sitting there,” said White, noting the last time Sulphur Mountain burned was in the 1880s.
“If it ever did burn, the fire will roll up to the top of the mountain and all the sparks and embers will come floating down into town. Most towns don't have a massive mountain covered with trees right upwind.”
Earlier this week, the Town of Banff got word it was successful in a provincial grant application for $86,000 to do maintenance work on 50 hectares within the townsite where FireSmart fuel reduction has been done over the years.
In addition, that money will also pay for forest thinning work near the Fenlands recreation centre this year, followed by burning the piles in early winter.
Silvio Adamo, the Town of Banff's Fire Chief and protective services manager, said he believes the Town of Banff is well prepared in the event of a wildfire, noting the municipality also continues to work closely with Parks Canada.
He said the Town of Banff has led the way with FireSmart, but noted there wouldn't be a tree within 10 metres of any structure if the guidelines were strictly followed.
“There's always more that we can do, but we are more prepared than most communities out there and we have been taking this seriously for a very long time,” said Adamo.
“We can never eliminate all the risk, obviously, unless we bulldoze and cut all trees within a kilometre of the community - and nobody wants that.”
Parks Canada officials say there are several prescribed fires on the books this year, including a burn at Moose Meadows, about 26 kilometres west of the Banff townsite. The prescribed burn is part of ongoing work on a valley-wide fuel break in the middle Bow Valley.
“There's always more that can be done,” said Bill Hunt, resource conservation manager for Banff National Park. “We've done a lot already, without a doubt, and we plan to do more.”
Parks Canada also plans to thin old, dense forest at the Fenlands Loop and Forty Mile Creek area at the west entrance to town, where there have been several small wildfires over the years, mostly from illegal campsites in the woods.
“It's an ecologically sensitive area and we've been working with NGOs (non-government organizations) on what that should look like,” said Hunt.
Additional thinning and fuel reduction work is on the books for Sulphur Mountain - where Brewster Travel Canada operates a sightseeing gondola - beginning with the west side of the mountain.
“There's a lot of fuel in there,” said Hunt. “We've been meeting with Brewster this spring to talk about fire plans and make sure we all know what each other's going to do.”
In addition, Parks Canada is updating its fire management plan for Banff, which will form part of a master fire plan for Banff, Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay. It will be subject to public review early in 2017.
“We have three different management areas for fire suppression,” said Hunt. ”There's areas where, no matter what, we hit it hard and put it out, there's areas where we leave it and burn, and then there's areas where decisions have to be made.”
White said one of the best examples of a fuel break in the Bow Valley is Parks Canada's work on the one-kilometre guard at Carrot Creek. That fuel break held a prescribed burn in 2003 - the driest year in 50 years at the time and the year fires burned down parts of Kelowna.
He said a prescribed fire in the spring of that year stayed within the containment area through spring and into summer, until it took a bit of an easterly run in mid-August towards Harvie Heights.
“It was a model of how to go into an extreme fire season. That prescribed fire burned throughout summer and the fuel break held it,” said White. “That fuel break saved SilverTip and Harvie Heights.”
The consequences of a wildfire are big.
White said the Trans-Canada and Canadian Pacific Railway would be closed for several days, and the electrical power linkage to Banff and Lake Louise would be out for an even longer period of time.
He said he suspects a fire from Sulphur Mountain has the potential to destroy at least 20 per cent of structures, force the long-term evacuation of residents and close off the town to tourists.
“This type of event befell Yellowstone National Park in 1988, and numerous other western cities, towns and parks since then,” said White. “This year it was Fort McMurray.”
