Parks Canada permitted the perfect conditions for disaster
A heavy dread has set in that a very special place has been lost, or at least irreversibly changed, but with that comes another sting: that this was a problem of human making, and that it was one that park authorities should have addressed long ago.
Warnings of a mega-fire have rumbled for years in Jasper. Preventing fires has been the priority for many of the years since the park’s inception in 1907, in the interest of preserving the forest. But the forest naturally burns on cycles ranging from 50 to 200 years — old, dead growth must ignite to clear out dead carbon and make way for young trees and grassy meadows.
In the 1980s, some controlled burning was wound into the park’s arsenal of fire suppression tactics to account for natural cycles. It was still far from enough, according to a 2022 Parks Canada report: “The scale and frequency (of prescribed fires) has not compensated for the loss of fire disturbance from removing Indigenous ignition practices and applying wildfire suppression actions after World War II.”
Compounding the problem is the mountain pine beetle and the good many trees it’s killed (read: fire fuel created) in recent years, a factor of warm climate conditions.
Only Jasper’s old-growth forests, at 33 per cent below target, weren’t rated “poor.”
It was a tinderbox.
Tragically, apparent from the scenes Thursday morning, human efforts didn’t catch up in time.
One resident, Marie-France Miron, skeptical of Parks Canada’s optimism, sent her thoughts to the Jasper Fitzhugh.
“The sheer volume of dead and dying pine trees represent an incredible amount of fuel ready to ignite under the right conditions and threaten our town. I wonder how we could’ve let this problem grow to its current state,” she wrote, noting that some areas were still “dead red” despite Parks Canada’s interventions.
Other complaints were made that the military was called in too late, and that the military was too slow to respond.
But the availability of a few dozen, or few hundred, more people to spray water onto a raging inferno in hellish conditions could only have done so much. The best time to prevent this fire was during summers past. With any hope, Ottawa will apply the dire lessons learned in Jasper to the rest of its mountain parks.
National Post