Thompson-Nicola Regional District to host second public meeting discussing wildfires on Tuesday at 2 p m - Kamloops News castanet.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from castanet.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
We’re on the brink of a ‘runaway fire age.’ Here’s why. And how to respond.
Ed Struzik is a fellow at Queen’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen’s University, author of
Firestorm, How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future and a new book on fire that McGill-Queen’s University Press is publishing early next year. SHARES A motorist watches from the Trans-Canada Highway as a wildfire sweeps down a mountain near Lytton, BC, destroying the town on July 1.
Photo by Darryl Dyck, the Canadian Press.
Five days after wildfire destroyed the town of Lytton in British Columbia killing two people and injuring several others, officials were still trying to account for some residents who were missing. No one apparently saw the fire coming. When they saw smoke, according to Mayor Jan Polderman, it took all of 15 minutes before the whole town was ablaze.
The 170 new starts come on the heels of a record-setting heatwave at the end of June and a thunderstorm in the region on July 1. Kamloops Fire Centre (KFC) manager Kaitlin Baskerville said the heatwave accelerated the drying out of vegetation in most of the province by three weeks and many fires have experienced extreme growth as a result. “We are currently seeing conditions that more closely resemble what we would see mid-August and we’re seeing it at the end of June and beginning of July with the temperatures we’ve seen and the lack of precipitation over the last two months,” Baskerville said of fire conditions in the KFC.
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Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
In the 2017 and 2018, 2.55 million hectares burned across British Columbia, Canada, including unanticipated large and high-severity fires in many dry forests. To transform forest and fire management to achieve resilience to future megafires requires improved understanding historical fire frequency, severity, and spatial patterns. Our dendroecological reconstructions of 35 plots in a 161-hectare study area in a dry Douglas-fir forest revealed historical fires that burned at a wide range of frequencies and severities at both the plot- and study-area scales. The 23 fires between 1619 and 1943 burned at intervals of 10–30 years, primarily at low- to moderate-severity that scarred trees but generated few cohorts. In contrast, current fire-free intervals of 70–180 years exceed historical maximum intervals. Of the six widespread fires from 1790 to 1905, the 1863 fi