Six months after the Jasper wildfire stole headlines across Canada, a new 100-page book details the experiences of evacuees and firefighters while also exploring why the blaze happened.
Canadian Press reporter Matthew Scace, who was with the Calgary Herald when the fire broke out, was offered the chance to write Jasper on Fire: Five Days of Hell in a Rock Mountain Paradise after Ken Whyte, the president of Sutherland House Books, saw an article he wrote about Filipino immigrants who evacuated.
“Once he offered me the opportunity, I said yes right away because Jasper’s a place that’s really close to my heart,” Scace said.
Having lived in Prince George for almost a year-and-a-half, Scace had spent a lot of time in Jasper. He recalled a feeling of dread upon hearing about the wildfire, which forced 5,000 residents and 20,000 tourists to evacuate and destroyed nearly a third of the townsite.
Scace wanted to focus on the first five days of the disaster while also going back in history to understand the converging factors that led to this.
While acknowledging the fire was partly the result of natural processes and a warming climate, the book also stated that “it was helped along by decades of town planning that had made homes uniquely accessible to fire.”
Cedar shakes, in particular, made homes vulnerable to falling embers.
Scace noted specific Parks Canada’s building codes and architectural motifs were for Jasper, with cedar shakes being one of the materials sought early on when the town was being built, despite being extremely flammable.
While Jasper’s land use policy was recently updated to prohibit wood exteriors for new buildings, this remains an open question for many municipalities within wildfire-prone areas, and there are buildings still standing in Jasper that have cedar shakes.
“I don’t know if it’s going to be insurance companies providing incentives for people to swap out their roofs,” Scace said. “I know that local governments are strapped for cash, so it’d be hard to find incentives for those things, but it’s an expensive process to change the roof or fundamentally change the structure of your home on the exterior, so it’s not something you can just ask people to do.”
According to the book, the fire was also due to “decades of forest mismanagement.” Scace emphasized he was referring to fire suppression in the mid-20th century.
“It’s not alleging that there’s current forest mismanagement,” Scace said. “I think Parks Canada is extremely aware of the problem [and] has been aware for several decades now. It’s just a challenge to undo several decades of suppressing fire.”
The book includes interviews with, among others, Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland, Jasper Fire Chief Mathew Conte, Deputy Fire Chief Don Smith and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. Scace also spoke with an evacuated woman who was expecting to go into labour.
One story that stuck with Scace was Ireland, who both lost his home in the fire and led his community through the disaster.
“He was in this very challenging position of having to be a leader who is also experiencing a large amount of loss,” Scace said. “And I thought that he was just an inspiring example of what a local leader can and should be in the middle of crisis.”
As for his interview with Smith, Scace didn’t feel as though she was complaining about Ottawa mismanagement, but her comments suggested there was “a gap in communications” between Parks Canada and the Alberta government. According to her, she also felt compelled to give a press conference the morning after the wildfire after Parks Canada only offered to put out a statement.
“That came up because I had asked her about that press conference, and she obviously got quite emotional,” Scace said. “Normally – she told me, at least – that she would read through a statement several times to just get out those emotions, and she didn’t have the opportunity to do that, so when she’s reading it, she felt as though she’s sort of reading for the first time, and then I guess what came out of that is what we saw on the screen.”
Scace was optimistic for Jasper in the long-term, believing tourists would still want to visit the mountain town regardless of the fire, but acknowledged it would be a difficult couple of years, particularly when it comes to housing.
He also thanked the Jasper residents who took the time to speak with him for his book.
“I know that it came out on a short timeline and as people were dealing with the aftereffects and aftermath [of the fire] and trying to piece their lives together, and for them to be willing to talk with me for this relatively short book was extremely generous,” he said.
Jasper on Fire is Scace’s first book. Ten per cent of the proceeds from the book will be donated to the Jasper Fire Caring Community Fund.
