A wall of fire rages outside of Fort McMurray, Alta. Tuesday May 3, 2016. Raging forest fires whipped up by shifting winds sliced through the middle of the remote oilsands hub city of Fort McMurray Tuesday, sending tens of thousands fleeing in both directions and prompting the evacuation of the entire city.

A wall of fire rages outside of Fort McMurray, Alta. Tuesday May 3, 2016. Raging forest fires whipped up by shifting winds sliced through the middle of the remote oilsands hub city of Fort McMurray Tuesday, sending tens of thousands fleeing in both directions and prompting the evacuation of the entire city.
Photo Credit: PC / Terry Reith

To prevent future wildfires, let some fires burn: expert

To prevent future wildfires similar to the one that has ravaged the northeastern Alberta community of Fort McMurray, forcing over 88,000 to flee their homes, Canada has to change the way it manages land, says a Canadian expert on natural disasters.

“We very slowly have to change people’s perception about fire being a bad thing,” said Glenn McGillivray, managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction in Toronto. “Sometimes a fire is a bad thing as it is now in Fort McMurray, but if you have a fire in the middle of a forested area with nobody around it, well, perhaps that fire should be left to burn.”

(click to listen the full interview with Glenn McGillivray)

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Canadians will have to come to a new accommodation with the fire and will have to accept it more, he said.

“People who move into these beautiful areas that are next to forests… they really have to understand the risk,” McGillivray said. “And they have to understand that you can’t always pick up the phone and expect to be saved.”

Becoming fire smart

 A wall of fire rages outside of Fort McMurray, Alta. Tuesday May 3, 2016 as a wildfire threatened the city. Raging forest fires whipped up by shifting winds sliced through the middle of the remote oilsands hub city of Fort McMurray Tuesday, sending tens of thousands fleeing in both directions and prompting the evacuation of the entire city.
A wall of fire rages outside of Fort McMurray, Alta. Tuesday May 3, 2016 as a wildfire threatened the city. Raging forest fires whipped up by shifting winds sliced through the middle of the remote oilsands hub city of Fort McMurray Tuesday, sending tens of thousands fleeing in both directions and prompting the evacuation of the entire city. © PC/Mary Anne Sexsmith-Segato

McGillivary said he wants to see a change in attitudes.

“I want people who aren’t directly impacted by this event to think, ‘Wow! This can happen to me,’” McGillivray said. “It’s a deadly dangerous mindset to think that these events only happen to other people.”

Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking that they will be affected by a natural catastrophe, people are always shocked it happens to them, he said.

“But the unthinkable only becomes thinkable once things happen,” McGillivray said. “We want people to think about this before it happens to them.”

There are concrete measures people can take to prevent wildfires from becoming disasters, he said.

“I think it’s very important to look at Canada’s FireSmart program,” McGillivary said. “We think this is, probably, the best program in the country that people can turn to learn about the things they can do to protect their properties, but also their neighbourhoods and their communities as well.”

The FireSmart program consists of three concentric circles and each of those circles.

Protecting your property

The first circle is around your property, he said.

“You can make sure that your property is landscaped with vegetation that’s not flammable,” McGillivray said.

Property owners can do things like preventing taller bushes and shrubs from growing right up against the house, they can ensure that trees are trimmed properly, they can clean up the property of forest litter – pine needles, leaves, twigs – things that can become fuel for the fire, he said.

Also don’t stack firewood against the house, don’t put propane tanks beside your house and don’t install woodsheds beside your house, he said.

New urban planning

An image of the fire Tuesday as it burned into the town.

Same types of principles apply to a neighbourhood and also to the broader community, McGillivray said.

“The keys there are thinning fuels, thinning out forest of forest litter, of dead trees,” McGillivray said. “You might still get a wildfire but it won’t be nearly as intense as it would be if you didn’t do that.”

Urban planners have to apply some of the same lessons they have learned in the last decades from flood management, he said.

“We’ve been using land use planning to get people out of floodways and floodplains,” McGillivray said. “But they’re only now starting to use those same principles for a wildfire.”

For example, in Ontario the provincial planning act now includes wildfire as a hazard and makes it mandatory for municipalities to think about wildfire when they are doing urban planning, McGillivray said.

Dusting off old reports

Canadian officials also should take another look at the Canadian Wildland Fire Strategy signed by provincial and territorial leaders in 2005, which has been sitting on a shelf gathering dust, he said.

“It’s an excellent program,” McGillivary said. “If we’d pulled it off the shelf and dust it off, it would be just as relevant today as when it was signed a few years ago.”

Canada is facing some key problems in its preparedness to fight wildfires, he said.

There have been drastic cutbacks in wildfire science in Canada, there is ageing infrastructure and equipment used to fight wildfires, there is the retirement of key people in the research field, downloading and offloading of government responsibilities, and more people living in wild-urban interface, McGillivray said.

“So when you add climate change in the mix you have a very dangerous combination of events,” he said. “One of the things that is clear is that we can’t fight every fire in the future, it’s not going to be possible.”

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