The geographical landscape in and around the Bow Valley will be gradually changing in the coming years.
Though new development for a growing population is often the go-to thought when change is occurring, new fireguards and prescribed burns will aim to offer greater protection to both the population and communities.
One only has to look at archived photos from 100 or more years ago to see a considerably different landscape. Not only were the communities far smaller than they are now – which is true of the majority of towns and cities across the country – but the forests surrounding the valley municipalities were far thinner and more widely dispersed.
Initial work will soon start for a fireguard that will stretch from the Banff National Park east gates to Dead Man’s Flats looking to offer greater protection for everything in between, including Canmore.
Additional fireguards or prescribed burns in the Lake Louise area and Ribbon Creek area in Kananaskis Country will see huge swaths of land transformed with the intent of greater protection against wildfire.
The three different levels of government have continually done fireguard work with the resources and funding available, but there should be little surprise a greater emphasis will take place following the Jasper wildfire last summer.
The fire presented a worst-case scenario for a mountain community.
An evacuation warning turned into a full-on evacuation in a matter of hours. Within 48 hours, roughly one-third of the Jasper townsite was razed to the ground and significant portions of the national park had been burned. The fire was not deemed under control until more than six weeks after fire ripped through the area.
Buildings can be reconstructed, forests can grow once again and thankfully there were no human fatalities in the wildfire.
With the exception of smaller wildfires, the Bow Valley hasn’t seen a large-scale one in more than 100 years.
In this region, the last major wildfires were the 2003 Tokumm-Verendyre and 2017 Verdant Creek wildfires in Kootenay National Park. The 2003 one tore through about 16,000 hectares and in 2017 it was roughly 18,000 hectares. In comparison, the Jasper wildfire went burned 39,000 hectares.
The threat of wildfire across the country has increased as changing climate has added extra nuance to the existing concern.
The 2023 Canadian wildfire season was the worst in the nation’s recorded history with about 18.5 million hectares destroyed. As of late September, an estimated 5.3 million hectares have been burned this year, far above the 10-year average of four million hectares, according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC).
Though most of the fires are in unpopulated or sparsely populated areas, the resulting impact can be felt across Canada and the United States. For each wildfire season, it’s not uncommon for fires in northern British Columbia or Alberta to have smoke impact provinces as far away as Ontario and Quebec and dipping into the northern United States.
It also leads to firefighting aid coming from dozens of countries and an immediate economic impact.
The federal government’s cost of wildfire protection has increased about $150 million each decade since the 1970s, with it costing more than $1 billion annually five times from 2010-17, according to Natural Resources Canada statistics.
For insurable costs, the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire remains the highest in Canada at $4.5 billion, but Jasper’s is now ninth at $880 million in estimated insured damage.
As a positive, public education and people's understanding that their actions have consequences have seen the number of fire starts significantly decrease since the 1980s. In 1989, for example, there were 10,998 fire starts compared to about 5,400 this year, according to CIFFC data.
In the coming years, a greater priority of decision-makers in different levels of government needs to put emphasis on increased fire protection.
With a finite amount of resources, it’ll undoubtedly mean other priorities will be minimized or fall to the wayside. But with the growing wildfire threat impacting all corners of Canada, the need is clear.
