While the B.C. government has earmarked $145 million over three years to move the BC Wildfire Service to a year-round operation, don’t expect that change to take effect until after this summer’s wildfire season.
“[September] is historically when some of our auxiliary workforce would be departing. We’d be looking at that permanency to allow that to not happen at the end of 2022,” Cliff Chapman, the Provincial Director of Wildfire Operations, said Friday morning.
“In terms of the fire season for this year, we will have full capacity, so what we have had plus a slight increase [of between 50 and 100 firefighters]. They will be back April 1.”
The Wildfire Service already has upwards of 400 people on permanent staff, but it adds about 1,000 auxiliary and support staff for “what has become more of an eight-month season,” Chapman said.
The government has also allocated another $98 million for prevention work and maintenance on forestry roads, while another $26 million is earmarked to upgrade the wildfire service’s facilities.
It aims to also move the Wildfire Service from its current model of reacting to fires once it breaks out to one that involves more planning and prevention work in the shoulder seasons.
“There is a large investment that has been announced to partner with UBCM to protect communities, “Chapman said, when asked to specify what a proactive wildfire service meant.
“We need to start in people’s backyards, then it goes to the neighbourhood, then it’s the wildland or urban interface, which is Crown land adjacent to communities, and then all the way out into the forest lands.”
“In addition to that, we are going to increase our capacity in our prevention program within BC Wildfire Service to put our focus in on that Crown land and to partner with the forest industry and other partner agencies and stakeholders like the Cattlemen’s Association and beyond to make sure that we really are looking at risk reduction across the province,” Chapman added.
B.C.’s Minister of Jobs, Ravi Kahlon, says he expects that the majority of new people hired by the BC Wildfire Service will be “boots on the ground.”
“There is always need for capacity. I had the opportunity today to visit and hear from some of the folks who are doing the important work of tracking logistics and making sure that we are able to move our resources through the province,” Kahlon said, during a stop in Kamloops Friday.
“Everyone’s job is critically important in this. The team, the leadership here, is going to do that important work of identifying where those resources are going to be, but certainly we know that boots on the ground are going to be critically important”
Kamloops was the epicentre of last summer’s wildfire season with the largest blazes in rural areas near the city.
“I know from the conversations I’ve had with people who were in Kamloops, that the experience from the fires last year is still front and centre people’s minds and a lot of them are thinking what’s next,” Kahlon added.
The province’s budget for wildfire suppression was $136 million last year and by July 2021, fighting fires had already gone $60 million over that budget. Provincial estimates show the 10-year annual average for spending is $265.3 million.
– With files from The Canadian Press
