"I really worry about Whistler, especially Alpine and Emerald. There is a lot of fuel — dead wood — lying around the ground there and of course everyone has chosen to build their $800,000 shack in the middle of the woods. The whole thing is a bomb waiting to happen. It’s definitely a question of when, not if.
What do lightning, cigarettes and campfires all have in common? The correct answer does not come with any financial reward, but if you said that together they are responsible for about 90 per cent of all forest fires in British Columbia, then you would be right.
Last year $52.7 million was spent by the provincial government to fight close to 2,000 forest fires. That represents over 17,000 hectares burned.
Lightning strikes accounted for about 30 per cent of that total, so unless you’re Zeus we can’t really hold anyone accountable. Human beings, however, take the blame for the rest of all forest fires.
So with wild fire season soon upon us, if not already here, what protections are in place to prevent more precious hectares of forest land being reduced to ash?
Well, here in British Columbia where there certainly is plenty of precious forest to protect, the B.C. forest service has aimed extensive resources towards both the prevention and suppression of forest fires. Take for instance that old stalwart the lookout tower. Although not present on the coast (the local geography makes them impractical), they are still maintained throughout the rest of the province. Personally I have always had a somewhat romantic notion of these wilderness sentinels, manned by generations of college students who spent summers in solitary seclusion keeping watch over the vast hinterland, hoping to catch a wildfire in it’s infancy.
In the past spotters would spend the entire season in the outback — sometimes as long as April through October — with a radio as their only connection to the outside world. These days the lookout towers are only manned intermittently during times of high fire hazard. What has taken their place is a network of lightning sensors strategically placed across the province and linked to a central computer in Victoria. While no doubt much more efficient, they don’t quite capture the imagination the way fire spotters do. Call me old fashioned but I like the human touch.
Fire-fighting jobs that still require human beings — and most likely will for the foreseeable future — include the initial attack squads, unit crews, fire attack officers and water bomber pilots for the B.C. forest service.
If these various designations hold a distinctly military connotation, so does the way people in the service talk about their jobs. For instance when chatting with Mark Fletcher, head of the Pemberton fire unit as well as an air attack officer for the coast region, he uses terms like: tactics, strategy and "getting the planes on target." So does Andy Goss, also a senior member of the Pemberton fire unit. He describes new applicants as recruits and refers to their initial training as "boot camp."
But don’t expect to find recruiting posters covering the walls of your local watering hole anytime soon. For even though it is easy to imagine a stern Smokey the Bear with one hefty paw outstretched, urging you to join the "fight," it is entirely unnecessary. Mark informs me there were over 2,000 applicants for 50 positions this year, which is a pretty typical ratio.
"It seems as if they like to get them green and mold them these days," says Mark who is a 25-year veteran himself. "Personally I’m a big proponent of experience."
Andy Goss, no slouch either at 15 years and still going strong, doesn’t state a preference for current recruiting practices, but he does note that injuries are down since the forestry service took over administration of the various wild fire fighting components. "Back when I started they pretty much took anyone as long as they had some back woods experience," he says with a laugh.
Andy’s backwoods experience began as a tree planter. He then found his way to smoke jumping in the Yukon.
Asked how he made that leap: "Your body can only take so much, so you kind of have to find something else." I suppose the fact that he chose jumping out of a DC-3s into blazing forest fires is a testament to just how difficult tree planting is. Either that or he’s just plain crazy.
Although Andy appeared lucid enough when I met him at the Pemberton forestry base which lies at the end of a long dusty road just past the Pemberton airfield, nestled against some of the most spectacular peaks in the coast mountain range. Andy is an athletic looking 45 and his Grizzly Adams beard does nothing to subtract from his youthful demeanor.
On my arrival he pointed out a forlorn looking portable, sitting in the field in front of the base. "That’s what we used to work out of." The crew now has a permanent structure. It has been under construction for the last several years and they have only just moved into it. "They" are the two unit crews comprised of 20 firefighters each — The Heat Seekers and the Salish Nation from Mount Currie. They are, Andy informs me, "two of the top crews in B.C."
The full complement also includes five initial attack crews of three men each. The IA crews are always first on the scene and actually handle most fires themselves, being quick to jump on lightning strikes and other spot fires. They rely on their own fire truck to get into most of the places. For more inaccessible areas, the crew travels by helicopter, sometimes rappelling from high above the tree line in the more severe cases
The unit crews go operational from June 4, but at the time of my visit the base was all but deserted. Besides Andy, I found only Jody Poulton at the base. He was busy readying first aid packs and storing them in the long row of cubicles filled with overalls and various equipment in anticipation of the busy season to come.
Jody is one of the young guns of the forest service and like Andy, he started as a tree planter before deciding he needed something with a little more excitement. Originally from the eastern townships in Quebec he has made Whistler his home for the last several years and is somewhat unusual in that he commutes from Whistler to Pemberton for work.
"I went from pushing snow on Whistler mountain to fighting a blaze in Pemberton within the space of a week," he tells me. I ask how he decided on this line of work. "Well I like to be out in the woods, plus the pay isn’t bad."
I ask Andy if he worries about the dangers involved in his profession. He takes pride in pointing out their safety record — there have been no deaths since 1991 and very few injuries, which he attributes to intensive training both in the field and in the classroom. Plus, as Jody points out, in this region there are a lot of hikers mountain bikers and climbers out in the woods at any one time, and now that more and more of them carry cell phones, they have become a reliable and constant source of information.
"Last summer we got a call from the Elaho valley. They gave us compass co-ordinates and had already started a fire break by the time we got there. That certainly makes our job easier."
When the fires do become big that’s when the unit crews go in and the water bombers are called up. In times of high fire hazard — a dry couple of weeks in the summer or just after a heavy lightning storm — the water bombers or air tankers as they are called here in B.C. will be on constant alert.
"It’s a blast," says Mark Fletcher when asked about his duties as air attack officer. "You have an instant impact on fires." Mark flies in the birddog or spotter plane and guides the big air tankers to their targets. The birddog planes can be anything from a single prop Beaver to a jet like the Cessna Citation. The air tankers vary in size from the 3,000-4,000 litre Air Tractor to the 20,000 litre Mars Bomber. They drop fire retardant, not water, as in other provinces where the terrain is less mountainous and there are abundant lakes off which to skim water.
Considering Whistler lies in a narrow valley surrounded by forests, I ask Mark if this terrain in particular is cause for concern from his point of view.
"I really worry about Whistler, especially Alpine and Emerald. There is a lot of fuel — dead wood — lying around the ground there and of course everyone has chosen to build their $800,000 shack in the middle of the woods. The whole thing is a bomb waiting to happen. It’s definitely a question of when not if."
So with those sobering words, here is the fire reporting hotline: 1-800-663-555, and remember Smokey the Bear’s admonishment: "Only you can prevent forest fires."
