“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

It’s wildfire season again, a season I’ve always dreaded but now dread even more because thanks to climate change it starts so much earlier than when I was fighting fires in the past.

In my case, the “past” was the late 1960s and early 1970s when wildfires were fought for $1.25 an hour and we were glad to get it. If you go back even further, police would drag “volunteers” out of the pubs and send them out in the bush to fight the flames. In the late 1950s, I remember Dad driving winding back roads to avoid police roadblocks on the main roads on our way to his favourite fishing hole in the Slocan River.

Those were the days.

That, of course, would never happen now because the days of using semi-sober men with strong backs to fight fires is long gone and rightly so. Wildfire fighting today has been “professionalized” and only trained crews are sent out to deal with the flames. And that’s a good thing, right? Probably so, but not entirely in my opinion.

Incredibly enough, when dangerous wildfires break out today often the first thing our “trained” fire crews do is light a fire. I know this sounds counter-intuitive but it happens all the time.

The fires lit are called backfires or controlled burns and they are set to remove “fuel” (trees and brush) between the backfires and the main fire burning out of control which causes it to go out when it hits the burnt over area and runs out of “fuel” to burn. Or so the theory goes. Unfortunately, what you often get is an even bigger blaze that burns everything in its path including houses, barns and anything made of wood. Or sometimes the wind changes and the fire goes out and great tracts of timber burn needlessly.

If you think I’m making this up, talk to the good folk of the Shuswap Lake area near Salmon Arm where in August 2023 a “controlled burn” (backfire) teamed up with a wildfire and burned dozens of homes including the local fire station!

In its wake, outraged homeowners launched a lawsuit against the BC Wildfire Service that has yet to be settled. Investigations filed by the BC’s Worker Protection Agency and WorkSafe BC say people’s lives were endangered by the raging blazes. The burn “could have killed or injured several firefighters who became trapped by extreme fire behavior,” said the Workers Protection Agency report.

WorkSafe BC said “the BC Wildfire Service did not adequately ensure safety during the burn in the Shuswap region.” Yup Martha, these are the “professionals” in charge of managing our Crown forests and protecting public safety.

It’s enough to make you sick!

But I’d venture to say that other than the victims directly affected precious few British Columbians will care a fig for the destruction we’ve been inflicting for over a century on our once magnificent forests and risking lives. It was good while it lasted, but in less than a decade, our old growth will be finished and there’ll be nothing left to burn but second growth which burns quickly and easily.

As a result, mills are shutting down all over the province and thousands of jobs lost as the big corporate companies flee to the US and Asia looking for low wage logging jobs and cheap timber there.

As I said earlier, it makes you sick. We need a public inquiry into this ecological tragedy which is blackening millions of forested acres and endangering human life and animal life too.  But unless it’s your house burning down, few seem to care.

Shame on all of us.

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who laments the needless loss of our once magnificent forests.

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