There’s plenty of ill-tempered debate about the cause of the Jasper wildfire, but one fact is undeniable: the danger of catastrophic wildfire has lurked and expanded in Jasper’s dry, dying boreal forest for many decades now.
It’s worth stating again — simply because many folks seem ignorant of this fact — that wildfire in Canada’s boreal forest isn’t an aberration. It’s not some new, unexpected and unnatural development. Instead, it’s a vital part of the forest’s circle of life, the flames regenerating the forest every 30 to 200 years.
The 2008 national parks plan was for safeguarding Jasper by cutting away vegetation in its immediate area and engaging in prescribed burns of decaying forest. Such burns had already taken out about three square km of old and diseased forest in the 11,000 sq.-km park in the 20 years from 1987 to 2008.
Aging trees are less able to fend off pests, so when the mountain pine beetles hit hard a decade ago, in part due to warmer winters, their populations exploded, staggering an already tottering and ancient forest.
Ireland said the park’s prescribed burn plan wasn’t a good one as it was difficult to find the right conditions for such burns. He suggested selective logging might be the way to go, even if that went against Parks Canada’s mandate for building up the “ecological integrity” of the forest.
They warned of a mega-fire that would not be stopped by a 100 metres vegetation-free zone around town and also suggested harvesting trees.
Was enough done between then and now to effectively mitigate the threat of a mega-fire?
At Monday’s press conference, I asked Parks Canada officials about the now common critique that federal park managers have been too focused on preserving the decaying forest in the name of ecological integrity, and not focused enough on protecting the town.
But Mayor Ireland, who lost his own home in the fire, rejected this narrative. Much was done to prepare the community for wildfire, he said. “For anyone who might see this as a failure, I reject that premise. This is a success. If you make an analogy to a battle, we anticipated with Parks Canada that something like this could happen, so we fortified our community.”
The wildfire was 140 square miles (about 360 square km), Ireland said, most of burning pine trees, dead from pine beetle. “There is no conceivable way to remove all of them. So we had to prepare for the eventuality of fire.”
Brave local volunteer firefighters, later joined by outside structural fire fighters, saved 70 per cent of the town, Ireland said.
His bottom line? “Everyone got out of town. Every resident, every visitor, got out safely. And most of our town was spared.”
Ireland makes some excellent points. And we certainly know who the heroes are, the Jasper firefighters. As for villains, that is yet to be fully determined. But perhaps we can agree on one key point, that more than 100 years of fire suppression — as well-meaning as it’s been — can lead to only one outcome in the boreal forest: when the big fire does come, it’s an unstoppable monster.