Preparing for Interface Fires ~ Forest Management

Overview

The wildfire zone is not only getting closer to people, but people are getting closer to the wildfire zone. The major interface fires which occurred throughout the British Columbia Interior highlighted the fact that community development, home building and other human activity continues to push into those ecosystems most susceptible to frequent and severe fires. This places an increasing importance on the province’s forest management decisions.

While wildfires occur naturally as part of the normal growth cycle of a forest, they are also influenced by what people do. Forest management was an issue raised in all public meetings and by many of the stakeholders and experts who met with the Review Team.

Specifically, knowledgeable observers pointed to the buildup of fuel in British Columbia’s forests as one of the reasons for the severity of Firestorm 2003 and why they considered the risk of future fires to be increasing.

By fuel, professional foresters mean combustible material needed for a wildfire to burn, such as trees, brush and other vegetation. The Auditor General of British Columbia, in his 2001/2002 report on Managing Interface Fires, noted that past successes in fire suppression have led to a buildup of vegetation and forest density. This puts the forests at extreme risk of wildfires during hot, dry and windy weather, all of which occurred this past summer.

This past fire season also heightened our awareness about the detrimental impacts of long-term fire exclusion (human intervention to extinguish periodic naturally occurring fires). This results in changes in tree stand structure, a decline in forest health, productivity loss, and increased fire severity, as well as negative impacts on air and water quality. These issues have been long debated in the forest management professions and in British Columbia’s forest communities.

The Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection’s Fire Management Team, formed after this summer’s wildfires, stated that the Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park area had missed three disturbance intervals due to fire suppression. “Disturbance intervals” are times when a wildfire would be expected to burn the area in a normal natural cycle. When this is prevented by firefighting activities, the fuel builds up over time, and eventually the forest erupts into a really big fire. The Fire Management Team warned that much of the province’s interior remains in a fuelled-up condition and the risk of future wildfires is high. The Ministry of Forests, Forest Protection Branch has long held this same view.

For this reason the Review Team believes a fuel management program must be re-introduced as a high priority in the interface zone. While forest management actions alone cannot reduce the probability of fire, strategies to reduce fuels in areas of identified risk, based on the best available science, should limit the impacts and increase the probability of successful fire suppression efforts in future interface fires.

Background on Fuel Buildup

To better understand the expert commentary heard by the Review Team and the recommendations we are putting forth, it is useful to briefly explain key concepts of forest management related to fuel buildup.

A wildfire’s progress is determined by three components in the environment: weather, topography and fuels. Weather and topography are defined by nature. Fuel is the only component where human intervention has any impact. Since fuel availability influences the severity of a fire, it is a key element in understanding risk and potential damage.

For a wildfire, a buildup of vegetation is a buildup of fuel. The more fuel there is, the harder the fire is to put out. “Ladder fuels” are the most problematic. These include low branches, young trees and any other vegetation that allows the fire to climb like a ladder into the upper branches of the tree and become a “crown fire.” Crown fires are the most dangerous and difficult to control, as burning embers can be spread by the wind to start new fires beyond the main fire perimeter.

After the late 1800’s, fires became less frequent in western North America. Resource management agencies began controlling wildfires, settlers instituted local fire control measures and grazing by domestic stock removed grassland fuels that had formerly supported surface fires.

As a Ministry of Forests document referring to First Nations practices stated: “the fire suppression policy of the BC Forest Service put a stop to most traditional landscape burning by the early 1930s. However, aboriginal burning is still carried out in BC on a much-reduced scale since reserves are federal lands and not subject to provincial regulations.”

Silviculture is a branch of forestry dealing with the development and care of forests. For the next several decades after the 1930s, controlled (prescribed) burns continued to be a popular method for disposing of slash and waste wood, but studies of its effectiveness yielded contradicting results. Provincially, total prescribed burning for silviculture purposes declined from over 90,000 hectares per year in the late 1980s to just over 10,000 hectares per year in 2000/2001.

More recently, fuel management has been a low priority in British Columbia, for these reasons:

• public concern over the smoke resulting from prescribed burns;
• strict and short windows or time frames for prescribed burning;
• increased risk of legal liability for wildfire problems;
• public concern over prescribed burns becoming out of control; and,
• lack of available funding and trained people.

At the public meetings on Firestorm 2003, the Review Team heard several presentations from ranchers, loggers and wildlife representatives who confirmed these impediments to controlled burning. These Interior residents had used controlled burns in the past to reduce the fuel load, but are now restricted from doing so. Similarly, the Forest Protection Branch expressed frustration at the general opposition by many influential stakeholder groups to prescribed burning as a management tool.

Another consideration is the effectiveness of British Columbia’s fire suppression program. Over the past decade, the success rate of initial attack by firefighting crews, measured as the number of fires contained to less than four hectares, has been 93 per cent as illustrated in the following graph.

When wildfires are successfully suppressed, the fuel that would normally burn during those fires tends to build, sometimes resulting in uncontrollable fires like those witnessed in Firestorm 2003. High fuel loads are not the only consequence of skipping disturbance intervals. Recent research shows that biodiversity and forage production are reduced, wildlife habitats are altered and the forests become susceptible to insects and diseases.

Fuel build up is particularly severe in the Rocky Mountain Trench

In the Rocky Mountain Trench region of eastern British Columbia, 70 years of fire suppression has resulted in high fuel loads, encroachment on grasslands and ingrowth, primarily by Douglas-Fir. Since 1952, the area has lost 114,000 hectares to forest encroachment and ingrowth.

A similar situation is occurring around Kamloops and the Okanagan Valley. Southern Interior residents have noticed the buildup of fuel, forest ingrowth and encroachment as well, and are very concerned about the loss of grazing land. As well as fire suppression, the increased fuel load has been attributed to slash left from logging.

Strategic Planning Needed Now

In the past decade, British Columbians experienced several significant interface fires including the Garnet Fire near Penticton and the Silver Creek Fire near Salmon Arm. However, these events appear to have had little impact on public policy. It is apparent in reviewing the history of the last decade that it has been difficult for any level of government to make meaningful changes related to fire management policy.

Policies and practices at all levels of government must be carefully reviewed as a part of the response to the fires of 2003. For instance, the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire clearly demonstrated that underestimating the impact of wildfire in resource management decisions, can have devastating impacts on British Columbia’s society and environment. Management goals must be integrated with ecological principles and understanding if British Columbia is to successfully manage its fuels buildup and fire risk problem. Ownership of the problem rests with both government and private landowners.

The Review Team received a presentation from the Mayor of Logan Lake. She described the community initiative that involved the municipal government, homeowners and local youth working to fireproof their community.

In a similar vein, residents of Galiano Island made a submission to the Review Team. They recognized the fire threat on their island and spoke in favour of a cooperative program to address fuel buildup. Indeed, in their view, all of the Gulf Islands are equally threatened when it comes to wildfire.

The Review Team Recommends:

Province to Lead Strategic Plan Development

The provincial government should lead the development of a strategic plan in cooperation with local governments to improve fire prevention in the interface through fuel management. The plan should:

• Focus on identification of those areas of the province where communities, infrastructure, and watersheds have the greatest potential to be impacted by large-scale fires.
• Identify and assign fuel management priorities based on threats to human life, property and resource values.
• Require a community protection plan in those communities with a high probability and consequence of fire in the interface zone.
• Be cost shared with local governments.
• Give priority for funding, fire management planning, fuels mitigation, and protection to these areas.

Undertake fuel treatment pilot projects

The provincial government should undertake a series of fuel treatment pilot projects in cooperation with municipal and regional governments in locations of high interface fire risk to demonstrate and prove the social, economic, and ecological costs and benefits of fuel treatments.

The provincial government should commit new funding for its share of the fuel management program.

It is not just the responsibility of senior governments to manage these risks. Local governments and individuals must also do their part.

The Review Team Recommends:

Adopt FireSmart

Municipalities within fire prone areas should formally adopt the FireSmart (Partners in Protection 2003) standard for community protection both for private and public property.

At a minimum, this standard should be applied to all new subdivision developments.

Look at Insurance Rates

The insurance industry should encourage and reward, through its rate-setting process, dwellings and communities built to acceptable standards.

The current area estimate for the wildland urban interface, in the Southern Interior of the province, is approximately 400,000 hectares. This number is expected to grow as human development continues to push into the forest. As a result, local governments must have a strengthened mandate to provide fire protection and reduce risks through the use of fire regulation, building codes and land use restrictions.

All levels of governance must be consistent in the application of regulations and standards that relate to community protection from wildfire. Across all jurisdictions and levels of government, measures to mitigate fire risk must meet a consistent and universal standard.

Land Management Must Include Fuel Reduction A number of Land and Resource Management Plans (LRMPs) have been developed for the province. Yet few of these plans address fire management in a meaningful way, by considering the impacts on ecosystems and the relationship to other forest management activities. Fire management considerations must become part of land management decision-making.

The Review Team Recommends:

Assess Land Use Plans

The province should review and amend Land Use Plans and LRMPs as required to incorporate fire management considerations. Fire experts must be available to influence and participate in land management planning.

Mandate for BC Parks Must Be Addressed

Similar to other areas of the province, particularly in fire-prone ecosystems, there is a growing forest health and fuels problem that poses significant fire risk not only to provincial parks and protected areas but also to the adjacent wildland urban interface.

Because a number of the major fires this past summer occurred in provincial parks and protected spaces, such as Okanagan Mountain Park, West Arm Park and Chilko Lake in the Brittany Triangle, a number of presenters expressed concern about the restrictions to forest management practices within these protected spaces which ultimately led to the development of unhealthy forests.

This concern is captured well in the following summary from the recently published book Firestorm - The Summer BC Burned by Ross Freake and Don Plant. The authors state:

“Professional foresters had predicted that a catastrophic fire would engulf Okanagan Mountain Park. The 10,000 hectares of forest had been left in their natural state untouched by fire for almost 50 years. The forest floor was covered by tinder. Blocks of standing dead trees grew bigger because falling them in BC parks is forbidden. Insects killed many of them, providing more fuel.” ¹

As may be seen from the answers which the Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection provided to specific questions, given in Appendix C of the report, the BC Parks Administration believes that the Ministry of Forests, Forest Protection Branch had the authority to address these forest management, fuel reduction and forest fire attack issues, after consultation with BC Parks and subject to the BC Parks pre-attack plan for each location. Clearly the authority has been at best indirect.

Ironically, the success of fire suppression in British Columbia’s forests during the past 80 years has significantly reduced wildfires and also resulted in dangerously increased fuel loads. Lack of natural wildfire has allowed the amount of mature lodgepole pine to increase to three times its normal occurrence in Interior forests. Lodgepole pine is the main tree species used by mountain pine beetle to carry out its life cycle.

Excessive mature pine, together with warming climates, has created an epidemic mountain pine beetle infestation across the Interior of British Columbia, and is expected to impact four million hectares of land, much of it in protected areas.

Breeding in huge numbers across the Interior, pine beetles bore into healthy trees and eventually kill them. This infestation has been ongoing for several years and is a disaster of similar magnitude to Firestorm 2003 in terms of its destructive effect on British Columbia’s forests. Though the issue is outside the Terms of Reference for this review, the pine beetle and wildfires are both natural phenomena which impact on each other in the forest environment.

BC Parks has recently recognized that more aggressive forest management activities are needed to withstand the insect epidemic. In late 2003, a BC Parks policy was approved to specifically allow for removal of trees from parks and protected areas to facilitate ecosystem restoration, human health and safety, and forest health objectives. This policy would allow for tree removal to meet broader objectives appropriate to parks, without allowing commercial logging, which is prohibited by legislation.

These tree removals would be conducted to a much higher ecological, health and safety standard, and would not focus on removing high value trees or maximizing profit. This would make the process far more costly than normal commercial harvesting. In order to fund this much-needed initiative, it is proposed to follow the Parks Canada approach of using the funds from the sale of the harvested wood to partially offset the costs.

The Review Team supports this policy initiative, which would be applied first in Manning Park and Silver Star Park, where a combination of excessive fuel loads and long-term mountain pine beetle infestation has left the forests at serious risk of wildfire damage.

Another policy initiative that will affect BC Parks is the proposed new provincial Wildfire Act, which makes it clear that the authority for acting on fire suppression within provincial parks and protected areas would in future rest with the Forest Protection Branch of the Ministry of Forests. We believe this to be an appropriate change in order to streamline decision-making in times of emergency. This will clarify the responsibility for decision-making on forest fire suppression in parks.

¹Freake, Ross & Plant, Don, "Firestorm-The Summer BC Burned", Copyright © 2003 by The Okanagan Valley Newspaper Group, a division of Horizon Operations (Canada) Ltd., McLelland & Stewart Ltd., pp. 14-15

The Review Team Recommends:

Reduce Fuel Buildup in Parks

The province should allow selective tree harvesting in provincial parks to reduce fuel buildup.

Ministry of Forests Responsible for Fire Suppression in Parks

Ministry of Forests, Forest Protection Branch should take the lead in suppressing fires in provincial parks, as proposed under the new Wildfire Act.

Reduce Risk in British Columbia Forests

A status quo approach to the buildup of fuel comes with considerable risks. Clearly, a different response to the buildup of fuels in British Columbia’s forests, particularly in the interface areas, is necessary. This response includes identifying the available alternatives, determining the effectiveness of each alternative and, finally, selecting the alternatives best suited to address fuel buildup in and around interface areas.

It must be remembered that fuel treatments alone will not reduce the probability of fire, but they will increase the chance of suppression success, once a fire has started. The end result must be a reduction in severity and behaviour of wildfire if fuel treatments of wildfire are to be deemed successful.

Reducing fuel buildup can be achieved using a number of recognized strategies. These include prescribed fire, thinning, thinning followed by prescribed fire, mulching and chipping, and fuel removal from the site. Prescribed fire has been identified by many stakeholders in the province as a beneficial tool to resolving fuels and wildfire threat within the interface. In prescribed fire, fuels within certain areas are intentionally set on fire under strictly controlled conditions. These fires serve to reduce the ground and ladder fuels and remove dead standing trees, while leaving behind live trees. However, research shows that prescribed burns have become uncommon in recent years due to:

• the inconsistent funding of prescribed burn programs;
• the failure of prescribed burns to meet stated objectives (fires escaped, or burned too hot, or didn’t consume enough material); and,
• negative public response to the resulting smoke and the potential for escape.

These issues are seen as significant impediments to the widespread acceptance and use of prescribed fire in British Columbia.

Thinning is the selective removal of trees from a forest stand. This reduces the ladder fuels and number of dead standing trees, decreasing the chance of crown fires. In the forest industry, a type of thinning known as “spacing” is performed. Spacing is the cutting of undesirable trees within a young stand to reduce competition among the remaining trees. As the cut trees, known as slash, are usually not removed from the site, this practice has resulted in large areas of surface fuel throughout many parts of the province.

For the purposes of fuel reduction, the slash cannot be left behind untreated. Thinning can only be considered an option if the slash is removed or treated to significantly reduce flammability.

In mulching and chipping, the fuels are reduced to small pieces, called chips, that remain on the forest floor. The layer of chips is referred to as mulch. Reducing the size of the fuels removes ladder fuels. It also increases the speed of degradation, the process by which the wood chips slowly become soil. This is beneficial since nutrients are returned to the soil, instead of being lost in the physical removal of the fuel.

However, during the degradation process, the wood chips are still fuel for wildfires. There may be opportunities for different levels of government and individuals to work in partnership to address this issue. Energy generation and biomass technology, which utilize wood chips, have been raised as potential solutions.

The Review Team Recommends:

Use Prescribed Burning

The province should establish strictly controlled conditions for using prescribed burning as a fuel management tool.

Deal With Slash

The province should require all slash within or adjacent to a wildland urban interface to be removed, treated or burned on site to mitigate the surface fuel hazard.

Amend Forest Practices and Policy

In 1995, the Ministry of Forests separated its land management and forest protection functions, including fire suppression. While reorganization resulted in an efficient and effective fire suppression organization, some have argued that this separation of land and fire management policy and practice has also resulted in decisions being made by one group without necessarily considering the implications for the other.

For instance, the Annual Allowable Cut (AAC) sets the volume of trees available for harvest for a given tenure holder. A tenure holder pays the provincial government for the right to harvest a specified area. Often, low quality and/or low volume forest stands that are marginal or uneconomic for harvest remain uncut, creating areas of high risk for wildfire.

Regardless of the quality and volume of wood available in these high-hazard stands, the volume harvested contributes to the AAC, thereby reducing the amount of high quality wood that the tenure holder could harvest. The Review Team heard arguments that the current policy is a disincentive for tenure holders to engage in proactive fuel reduction and fire management.

Furthermore, the addition of stumpage to the basic cost of harvest often negates the economic viability of operating in low-quality tree stand areas. Stumpage is the Crown rent paid by tenure holders to cut timber on provincial land. The situation is compounded by the complexities of the international softwood lumber trading arrangements and perceived stumpage-related subsidies currently in dispute between Canada and the United States.

The move to an auction based stumpage system may provide opportunities to deal with these problems.

The Review Team Recommends:

Consider Amending the Annual Allowable Cut

The Ministry of Forests should consider amending Annual Allowable Cut determinations in fire-prone ecosystems to encourage hazard reduction treatments by tenure holders in marginal and uneconomic tree stand areas within the wildland urban interface.

Look at Alternatives to Stumpage Where Practical

The province should investigate alternatives to stumpage as an incentive to encourage the harvest of high-risk, low value fuel types.

More Research and Development

Industry should undertake research into the use of small diameter trees in non-traditional forest products markets such as energy and bio-fuel.

Train More Fuel Reduction Professionals

The Review Team heard that, with the reduced focus on fuel management in recent years, the ability to effectively treat a fuel hazard has been reduced and is becoming limited by a lack of trained, skilled people. There is a shortage of professionals who understand how fuel characteristics relate to fire behavior and who can implement a fuel reduction program while meeting complex ecological, social, and economic requirements.

The effective use and application of prescribed fire will require the continued development of a highly skilled workforce with advanced knowledge of fire ecology, fire behaviour, fire effects and the consequences of poorly designed or poorly implemented projects.

The mechanical treatment of fuel hazards is less constrained by the need for advanced training but is still reliant on the need for skilled practitioners. Much work can be done that involves the use of traditional technology including mechanical and manual techniques.

However, additional training will be required for newer technology focused on altering the characteristics of the fuel through bundling, chipping and masticating.

The Review Team Recommends:

Retain the Knowledge Base

The province and the forest industry must pay particular attention to retaining the existing knowledge about fuel reduction practices and continue to develop and expand that knowledge base.

Be Partners in Research and Development

The 2003 fire season has raised many questions related to the ecological, social, and economic impacts of wildfire on communities. These questions all require timely answers if we are to maintain public safety, economic well-being and environmental quality throughout the province. Research into these issues is already being done in other jurisdictions in Canada and the United States.

The fuel types and ecosystems affected by wildfires in British Columbia and southwest Alberta this past summer are more similar to the northwest United States than the rest of Canada. Over the past two decades, devastating fires in this region of the United States have provided our neighbours with incentives to embark on a significant fire management research and development program. Many of the results of this work are now becoming available.

The Review Team Recommends:

Share Information

Wherever possible, British Columbia should focus on collaboration with North American and other jurisdictions to share knowledge and pursue research.