Front Burner - As fires rage, Canada urged to get on ‘war footing’

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

Forest fire season has come in with a bang. A record-setting blaze in Nova Scotia, plus sprawling fires in Alberta and now Quebec have claimed homes and forced tens of thousands to flee. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned this week federal modeling shows we’re entering an especially severe wildfire season. He also pledged the Canadian government would be there with “whatever it takes to keep people safe, and provide support.” But do we have the capacity? What is the plan to fight the fires of the future? Wildfire ecologist Robert Gray explains why Canada should get on a “war footing” to address these climate-change enhanced super-fires. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Saroja Coelho. For many of us, wildfires feel like a faraway problem. But not in Nova Scotia. I almost died. I almost died.

If you're in Hammonds Plains, the fire is spreading. It's very serious. I'm not kidding. Or in northern Quebec. Yesterday, it was pretty quiet, he says. But all of a sudden, it got out of hand. Then the whole village evacuated. We want to protect our infrastructure. Like in Quebec, we want to protect life.

We want to protect houses. Right now, across Canada, about 26,000 people are out of their homes. And that doesn't include others who have been evacuated and allowed to return home. It certainly was terrifying. Our municipality has not seen a fire on this scale in our recent memory. Across the country, there are currently 413 wildfires burning, and 249 of those fires are deemed out of control. Our modeling shows that this may be an especially severe wildfire season throughout the summer. These wildfires are not a tomorrow problem.

They are a right now problem and experts say they'll stay that way. So what's the plan here? Does this country have a strategy to deal with fire seasons that regularly torch hundreds of thousands of acres, putting human life, wildlife and ecosystems in serious danger? And if there is a plan, is it up to the task? I'm talking to Robert Gray, a wildlife ecologist based in BC, about this today. Hi, Robert. Hello. I want to begin with the situation we're looking at right now. First, we had a huge amount of land burned in Alberta. Now, the biggest fire ever in Nova Scotia. Evacuations are underway in Quebec. How bad do we expect things to be from here?

Well, most of the predictions for the rest of the summer and into the fall are not very promising when it comes to any kind of cessation and conditions. It's looking like it could be a pretty significant fire season. Temperatures are forecasted to be well above normal precipitation in some parts of the country, certainly below normal. So at that point, all it takes is ignitions. And as we've seen in the last week or two, we've had plenty of those too. So lots of ignitions, really dry conditions, and really conducive weather to rapid fire spread. Fire season is going to get longer, which means that outside of the summer, it's going to get longer in the spring and the fall. We're going to see more lightning occurrence across the

landscape. As temperatures increase, we're going to see more lightning. We don't get the nighttime recovery that we used to get. So in other words, it stays dry and hot throughout the night. We have these strong wind events. We have all these things that have been, they've been really well researched and modeled. And unfortunately, we've had the luxury of seeing things play out. So we know the models are actually pretty accurate. If anything, they're a little bit conservative. So we know what's coming. We just need to do what's necessary to mitigate what's coming. You're clearly painting a picture of danger ahead that we can get ready for. But are we actually ready? Do you have a

sense of how many, if we look at it really practically, how many helicopters, how many water bombers, trained firefighters do we have at our disposal at any moment in Canada? We don't have a lot relative to, let's say, the United States. So if the U.S. has a really bad fire season, they have about 35,000 professional firefighters they can draw from. And that's municipal fire departments, the National Guard, the military. And some years that 35,000 isn't enough. And they have contract contract they have access to contract firefighters as well 2021 in bc i think we had at one time about 3600 firefighters from across canada we had some international firefighters brought in as well and it was nowhere near enough you know most fires

that got going we were recording about 40 new fires a day at one point in July. And every single fire just seemed to go from a hectare to 100 hectares in a matter of minutes. We need a much greater capacity to tackle this issue, both in a preparedness sense and in a response sense. And we don't have those numbers right now. And, you know, pulling in our partners internationally in an emergency, it's great. We do that back and forth. We send resources to the states. We send resources to New Zealand and Australia. But it's not a sustainable model.

We have to build the local capacity in each of our provinces and across Canada. And we almost need to get on a sort of a climate-driven natural resources, natural disturbance war footing. It's not just the fires. It's the hurricanes. It's the flooding events. We need to have the capacity to deal with things locally when they occur. And if we exceed that local capacity, then we can bring in outside resources. But we have to just ramp up that capacity to deal with these natural disturbances.

The federal government has now committed $346 million to train 1,000 firefighters for new firefighting equipment and to plan a satellite system that would monitor wildfires. Now, that's a lot of money, but about 50% of that is the entire budget for removing snow from Montreal each year. Do you feel that the amount of money that's been dedicated here is on the scale of what we need? Nowhere near. And it doesn't have to be an entire subsidy. If we're putting people to work, not year round, because we do have winter here in BC, but if we can put people to work for eight or nine months of the year doing fuels mitigation work and then being available to tackle wildfires, then there's ways that we can stretch those dollars out. But even 300 some odd million dollars is nowhere near enough at the scale of this

problem. It needs to be in the billions. But until that's a reality, something that we're seeing is that the military is stepping in. We sent the military into Alberta. A community center turned military barracks in Drayton Valley. The stress of the mission etched on so many faces. We sent soldiers now to Nova Scotia as well. Working in close partnership with provincial emergency management officials, the Canadian Armed Forces are prepared to provide planning and coordination support, ignition specialist personnel and ignition equipment, and firefighting resources to assist with fire turnover, mop-up, and hotspot dowsing.

Soldiers are finding themselves on the front line of climate response. From what you're seeing, do you feel that they're prepared for that role? Only if they've had the proper training. Back in 2003, during that first sort of really big significant fire season in BC, I was training some of the military. And oftentimes they're put into very, you know, fairly cool, safe parts of fires to do mop up work, which then makes, you know, the more experienced and qualified crews more available to tackle, you know, the more difficult parts of fires. But we can certainly ramp up the training. A good model is the National Guard system in the US.

So each state has the National Guard and they're basically trained for all hazards. And you'll see them respond to hurricanes and flooding and certainly wildfires. And they receive a higher level of training than typically your frontline military does. So that's certainly a model. The Canadian military, it's pretty small and it's split between three different branches.

So great logistics, the support from aircraft and things like that, but boots on the ground, there's not a lot of them. And we need to build that capacity so that we're not relying on the military as well. They have a role to play, but we have to build that capacity outside of the military as well. During previous wildfire seasons out west, we've seen some disruption and damage to rail lines. This year in Alberta, oil and gas industries had to put their work on hold for a significant amount of time. What infrastructure, besides towns and cities, do you worry about the most at this point? Watersheds. Water security under climate change is a very significant issue. If we reduce the amount of forest cover in a watershed beyond about 20 or 30 percent through a disturbance like a fire, it changes the hydrology.

in increased peak flows, which is the springtime when the snow melts and the water comes out of the watershed. It can result in increased nutrient load to the system, which means that you have to do water quality treatment because now you've got too many nutrients in the water. And it can also result in reduced late season flows. So that means enough domestic water for things like drinking water and sewage, and in some places, agriculture. So if we visualize these watersheds as, you know, sort of vegetation cover throughout, and if we have a significant fire that reduces the forest coverage in that watershed, it changes the hydrology and the downstream effects are very significant. I want to talk about the electricity grid. A couple of years ago, officials in Oregon wanted

to shut down parts of the electric grid because power lines were falling and sparking fires. How protected is our electrical grid from wildfire? Not very well protected. The major high voltage systems are pretty well protected you know those huge metal towers that we see and even the very tall wooden post ones that we do see they're fairly well protected the wooden post ones not so much but the metal tower ones are it's the smaller feeder lines that are where the where the power lines are almost embedded in the woods or they're very close to the forest or or at the base of them there's all kinds of you know fuel accumulation it doesn't take much to bring those lines down and if the lines come down then they

can cause further fire starts so yeah our grid is not well protected. It's very similar to some of the threats that they've seen in California, where some of these large fires were caused by downed lines. Well, it's amazing, isn't it? A lot of the electricity was put in before we could ever conceive of fires on this scale. Exactly, exactly. And oftentimes when we see crews out, you know, cutting vegetation away from the lines, that vegetation isn't cleaned up. It's just left there. So you just took fuels from, you know, the forest, from the trees, and you just put them on the forest floor. I want to turn to where people are living. California has lost its major home insurer this month.

And State Farm has said that they're going to stop issuing new policies, full stop, to homeowners in California because they're receiving soaring claims after wildfires. The company cited a growing threat of natural disasters as well as rising construction costs and inflation. And now Allstate Insurance, the fourth largest carrier in California, just confirmed it stopped issuing new homeowner policies last year. Allstate also blamed wildfires and higher costs, saying, quote, the cost to insure new home customers in California is far higher than the price they

would pay for policies. And that's something that must be terrifying for anyone who owns property or needs to be insured in any way. Is that something that you could conceive of happening on this side of the border as well? It could happen here. For the longest time, wildfire wasn't really on the insurance industry's radar as a significant issue. Then we had 2003 with the major loss of homes and lives in Kelowna. Daylight inside the fire lines in the upper mission area of Kelowna. inside the fire lines in the upper mission area of Kelowna. Ground crews work furiously digging up the earth trying to stop the blaze from burning through the ground but overnight they were unable to stop the fire from claiming homes. And then subsequent years like Fort McMurray and so now it's in the top three. It's right up there with hail damage and flooded basements. Whether they get to the point of not insuring people, there's already some pullback from coverage.

So municipalities have to carry insurance. And when you drive into a community, you'll often see a sign on the side of the road that you're entering a certain fire protection district. In some cases, to maintain their policy, municipalities have actually had to shrink that fire protection boundary. So people who used to have fire department coverage no longer do. So that's already starting to happen. And so that's affecting municipal policies and not individual homeowners, but it's certainly feasible. So let me get this straight. We're not talking about insurance anymore. You're talking about actual firefighters and how far their service reaches?

But that's tied to the insurance industry. So the insurance industry, which provides policies to local government, they are encouraging the local government's fire department to shrink the fire protection boundary, to limit risks to policy. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples. I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I want to turn to some of the solutions or at least some of the approaches that are on the table.

So we've been paying a lot of attention in the last few weeks to fighting fires, but there is an approach that says that some of these fires are too strong to put out. Where do you stand on that? Oh, some of these fires, definitely. They're very large. You can't get anywhere close to them because of the erratic nature of fire behavior. They've done some really good work with some of these fires getting out ahead and doing what's called modified suppression or burnout operations. So in fact, in northern BC, they did about a 10,000 hectare burnout operation, which

gets out ahead of the main fire and it robs it of fuel. So you're going to go out ahead of it and light off a large area, consume the fuel so that when the main fire encounters that area, there's nothing left to burn in it. And basically it stops, forward progress. So in a year like this, when things are so dry, that's going to be a significant tactic. And it's just not safe to get people anywhere close to some of these fires. A lot of what you've been talking about has been about all of that fuel on the forest floor. So twigs, leaves, everything that dries out and can ignite. One strategy that has been in practice in this country has been prescribed burns.

You've been working with First Nation communities in BC on just those kinds of fires, even earlier today, I believe. And I understand that it's actually a traditional practice originally. Could you explain to us what a prescribed burn is? So cultural burning was a form of survival on that historic landscape, the pre-settler colonial landscape, the landscapes that were stewarded by Indigenous peoples throughout North America. And in order to survive on that landscape, you had to sort of keep burning back the trees, especially conifer trees like pines and firs and things like that. Because once you have a closed forest, there's no food. There was a very sophisticated understanding of fire ecology, basically how fire affected plants, individual plant species, medicinal plants, food plants, plants used in technology,

and that they knew when to burn, how often to burn, how hot to burn. And they burnt so much that the landscape didn't support these large fires we're seeing today. It was just pockmarked with these different age classes of vegetation that they functioned as fences to the movement of fire. So a fire would start and it would spread only so far before it hit some vegetation that just wouldn't burn. So, you know, historically, sort of that average fire size was about 50 hectares. And you just didn't have 100,000 hectare fires. So prescribed fire is in some ways we're mimicking cultural burning. Sometimes we have very similar objectives. And prescribed burning is the intentional application

of fire to meet very specific objectives on a very specific pot of land. We set, we have a boundary, we're going to burn within that, we keep the fire in the boundary, and we monitor to make sure that we're meeting our objectives. So that's what prescribed fire is. Is it possible that this could be done on a scale that would actually make a difference? You're talking about a massive amount of forest across Canada. At the scale that it needs to happen, we're a long way from that. There are places on the planet where they've been applying cultural burning and prescribed burning at that scale. Northern Australia, parts of the southeastern U.S. where they've just continued sort of cultural burning into the modern era.

And it's had a very significant impact on future fires. fires. We need to be burning in BC probably in the range of 100 to 150,000 hectares a year. I think this year on the books, there's about 10,000 hectares that's been prescribed and planned. But if we don't do that, we're just going to continue to see these very large fires and with all the attendant negative consequences that go with them. So it's not really a matter of can we, it's kind of we need to. Is there anything in that list of things that we should be doing that you think governments need to do right now? Certainly, in addition to prescribed burning, we need to really incentivize the bioeconomy. So that's non-traditional use of forest products. That's non-traditional use of forest products.

So oftentimes the fuel we're trying to remove from the forest, it doesn't have good quality when it comes to two-by-fours and pulp and things like that. So the other alternative is the bioeconomy. So that's producing pellets for bioenergy. It's grinding up wood and making engineered wood products so that we can make these sort of multi-storied wood buildings out of them. And the importance, especially from the engineered wood product side, is it's the long-term stable carbon storage, which is part of our Paris Accord requirements and agreements. So we need to incentivize that on a very large scale so that we can remove as much of that material as possible, do something with it, put it into long-term carbon storage. And then when we apply prescribed fire, we have much less emissions because we're not burning as much material. So those two things can go hand in hand. And it's not that hard to incentivize that

from a business perspective. Some of it is just going to require subsidies, dealing with foreign markets, having conversations with our trade partners throughout North America, a lot of little things like that that are fairly easy to do versus some of these bigger lifts that we have to do as well. So here we are in 2023. Slave Lake was the second biggest insurable disaster in Canadian history. That was in 2011 when it burned. A good portion of the town has already been burned to the ground. That includes the town hall, the high school, the library, the main mall in the middle of Slave Lake is also on fire at this time. Now you can see those large flames. Then we saw the devastating fire in Fort McMurray. That was 2016, which was so big that people started calling it the beast. We were completely blown away on day one because we just, you couldn't get it in its way.

The beast just continued to eat. It almost had a mind of its own. It would choose what it would burn. The entire town of Lytton, not long after that, in British Columbia, burned in 2021. Fifteen minutes after smelling smoke, the entire village was engulfed, according to the mayor. Here is Jan Polderman. The whole town was on fire. It took like a whole 15 minutes from, you know, the first sign of smoke to all of a sudden there being fire, you know, everywhere.

So we've stuck pretty closely to the dollars and cents impact in this conversation. But what have those disasters told us about the human costs here? Unfortunately, I think that gets lost in a lot of the conversation. Right now, we have, you know, several tens of thousands of people who have been evacuated. I believe it was up in Telegraph Creek, we had a community that was evacuated. They didn't even go home until December. It has a very significant emotional toll on people just being evacuated, whether or not they've lost their home or something. And then tragically, in Lytton, we actually had two fatalities. So not enough has gone into how to help these people come back from these disasters. I remember talking to the mayor of Slave Lake.

We had a conference, a fire conference in Kelowna a couple of years afterward. And we asked her to come and speak. And she said on the anniversary, the year after the fire, a lot of the children wouldn't go to school that day because they were afraid that if they left their home, they would burn up when they were away.

And the other big problem was a lot of the professionals who dealt with depression and anxiety associated with the incident, they were burned out and never moved back. So there's the people who need this help and support. And then especially in rural communities, we can't get those professionals to them. So these problems kind of linger. There's been an uptick in domestic abuse and substance abuse in these situations. And it's all stemming from people who are dealing with depression and anxiety that's associated with these very significant events. And we need to do more to prevent the events in the first place, which is the prevention mitigation

side. But the recovery side means that we need to get those resources to those people. If they've been evacuated, they need to be put in good surroundings, good, healthy, balanced surroundings. We need to get them back to their homes as quickly as we can, or in some cases, rebuild their homes. I mean, Lytton cases, rebuild their homes. I mean, Lytton still hasn't been rebuilt. So think about the trauma,

the extended trauma from those people two years on. You've given us so much to think about, Robert, with the human cost here, the financial cost, the environmental cost, this getting ahead of it, I'm sure is on everybody's mind to prevent any summer from looking like this one. Thank you so much for this conversation today. You're very welcome. Okay, that's all for today. I'm Saroja Coelho.

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