“Interface fires, which occur in places where wildland meets
urban development, were at an all-time record high. The interface fires of last
summer destroyed over 334 homes and many businesses, and forced the evacuation
of over 45,000 people. The total cost of the Firestorm is estimated at $700
million.” Sound familiar? Those words
were written by the Hon. Gary Filmon thirteen and half years ago, in the
Report of the Firestorm 2003 Review Committee.
That is why Bill Tieleman, a political columnist and
left-wing political strategist in Vancouver,
recently wrote a piece
provocatively titled “Blame BC Liberal Neglect, Not Climate Change, for Year of
Fires”. He alleges that that the
Liberals ignored key recommendations of the Filmon report, pointing out that over the years between 2006 and 2015,
the government spent only $8 million a
year to remove fuels from just 80,000 of a total of 685,000 hectares of “high
risk forest land”. As then -NDP
forest critic Harry Bains pointed out in
Question Period on March 3 2016, it took the government 12 years to treat
just 8 percent of the land considered to
be high risk by the Filmon Report.
Tieleman calls that the very epitome of the old saying: “Penny-wise,
pound foolish.”
In fairness to the previous government, let me push back at
Tieleman a bit. I had initially reasoned that if it cost the government $80 million over a
ten-year period to remove fuels from “just” 80,000 hectares, that would be only $1000 per hectare -- so it would have cost $685 million to fully
implement the Filmon Report. In fact, however the Forest Practices Board in its 2015 Report put the true cost of fully treating a hectare of land as somewhere between $5000 and $10,000, depending upon the terrain. And the pine beetle epidemic and other factors have caused the amount of "high risk" forest to almost double to 1, 347,000 hectares. That means the total cost for treating all of the high-risk forest land would be at least $6.7 billion. ‘Money
doesn’t grow on trees’. And no doubt land-use conflicts would arise closer to population centres, as thinning and prescribed burning would affect quality or value of privately-deeded or First Nations land. As for Harry Bains and the NDP, why did they wait
until March 2016 to start ringing the alarm bells in the Legislature? That
leads me to wonder whether the NDP would have fully implemented the Report’s recommendations, either: after
all, politicians get more credit for responding to problems than they do for
preventing them, most of the time.
Nevertheless, to those of us have been expecting another Big
Fire season for years, the only wonder is that it didn’t happen much sooner. And the fact that the problem has grown bigger should have been a reason for doing more, not an excuse for doing less. It
was always obvious that even the partial implementation of the Filmon
Report--such as we might have expected under an NDP government--would have been
a very worthwhile investment. For
example, an extra $16 million per year over 2006-2015 could have removed extraneous fuel from another
1000-2000 hectares on average surrounding
16 population centres in the interior. Admittedly, one or two thousand hectares is not a lot to show for 10 years work and $10 million dollars spent, but in the land adjacent to Williams Lake and 100 Mile House it would have made a significant difference, and would have freed up more firefighters to help smaller communities in the Chilcotin. As the B.C Forest Practices Board pointed
out in its Report in 2015, “hazard mitigation costs less than wildfires when
all costs are tallied.” No kidding.
