Foresters who raised alarm about Jasper fire hazard stress importance of fire prevention

For the past several years, Jasper has been surrounded by thousands of hectares of dead pine trees, prime fuel for fire.

Foresters Ken Hodges and Emile Begin began raising the alarm in 2017 after the pine beetle, which is native to Canada, killed off swaths of forest in Jasper. The beetle has left dead, red-hued forests across much of the region, which includes Jasper National Park.

The two had suggested widespread controlled burning and logging to clear out the dead wood, they told The Epoch Times.

“We’re talking about a stretch of land, a valley, that’s kilometres wide and 30 kilometres long, and it is absolutely full of pine beetle dead trees. There is no conceivable way to remove all of them,” Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland said.

Ron Hallman, president and CEO of Parks Canada, said his agency has been doing prescribed burns and did all it could short of bulldozing hundreds of thousands of hectares of beetle-infested wood. If their fire-prevention work had not been done, the damage to Jasper could have been worse and lives lost, he said.

Related Stories

About 100 metres had been cleared around the town boundary, Mr. Hallman said.

Mr. Hodges and Mr. Begin say a bigger buffer around the town could have been created. The foresters say Parks Canada was likely hindered by a reluctance to log or burn on a large scale in a national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site.

It says, however, that conditions do warrant action. Parks Canada recognized that 80 years of suppressing natural fires has created a buildup of fuel and ripe conditions for the beetle’s spread.

Historically, fires would have burned about every 15 years, but due to fire suppression, large, dense, continuous stands of pine became available to the pine beetle, Parks Canada said in its 2016 Mountain Pine Beetle Management Plan.

The Conditions for a Massive Blaze

Mr. Hodges and Mr. Begin are both retired now, but each worked as foresters for about 40 years. Mr. Begin spent 25 years successfully combating pine beetle infestations in the Kootenays.

Based in Prince George, B.C., they had close personal ties to Jasper and visited often. It’s only about a four-hour drive from Prince George.

It was around 2015–2016 that the beetles really “took off” in the Jasper area, Mr. Hodges said. He described how the conditions for a massive fire arose.

When the beetles kill swaths of pine, large openings are left in the forest’s crown and sunlight reaches the forest floor, causing more undergrowth.

“You need kindling to start a fire, right? Same thing here,” Mr. Hodges said. The vegetation below is the kindling, and the tall, dead wood is the main fuel.

The dead trees have loose bark, which can easily break off and fly away when it catches fire, travelling three kilometres on average, Mr. Hodges said. Especially if there’s any wind, the burning bark spreads the fire rapidly.

He spoke of the “30-30-30” conditions that often cause a fire: 30 percent humidity, 30 degree temperatures, 30 kilometre-per-hour winds. “You add the beetle to that, it’s a perfect storm.”

After Mr. Hodges and Mr. Begin raised their concerns, local authorities began looking at their fire systems and found infrastructure problems. Several hydrants were not working, Mr. Begin said. And the water line from the Athabasca River, which would provide much of the water for an emergency, was broken.

While Parks Canada has been doing controlled burns, Mr. Hodges said he would like to see burning on a larger scale.

Parks Canada incident commander Landon Shepherd said at the July 29 update that recent efforts had focused on the south, where the fire came from.

“That’s an area where we had some of the most work done to prepare for the potential challenges of a large and difficult-to-control wildfire,” he said. “We extensively removed mountain pine beetle fuel south of the community.”

Like Mr. Hodges, Lori Daniels, a forestry professor at the University of British Columbia, has said that decades of suppressing natural fires has led to massive amounts of fuel and prescribed burns need to be done on a large scale to make up for it, but they’re expensive.

With all the accumulated fuel, fires are higher intensity and can do more damage, she said.

“It’s almost silly to think in terms of … people taking control of the entire forest cycle of regeneration,” Mr. Green, who is a fellow at the Fraser Institute think tank, told The Epoch Times.

It’s important to manage the forest near towns, he said, creating a big enough buffer.

“Did they create a big enough barrier around the town to prevent the disaster the burning of the place? And the fact that it burned suggests that the answer to that question is no,” he said.

Parks Canada’s Mr. Landon said the spotting distance of the current fire from town was 500 metres to one kilometre, making it likely even a larger buffer would not have prevented damage to the town. Spotting distance refers to how far a firebrand can travel before burning out.

Mr. Green noted the challenges Parks Canada would likely face logging near town.

“People who move there want to be living in a forest,” he said, so efforts to cut out a very large buffer zone would likely meet with resistance.

Burns are likewise risky for the government, he said, as “even controlled burns can get out of control” and there are questions of liability. “Governments are going to be reluctant,” he said.

Jasper did FireSmart training in town. FireSmart is a national program that aims to increase resilience to wildfire by fire-proofing buildings and helping prepare for the event of a fire in various ways. Parks Canada’s Mr. Hallman said Jasper has been working on fireproofing the town for at least the past seven years.

Isaac Teo contributed to this report.