Kamloops city staff say water capacity is preventing them from pursuing the use of irrigation sprinklers on homes during a wildfire.

Sprinklers were used widely across Logan Lake when the town was evacuated for a week in August due to the Tremont Creek wildfire.

Kamloops Fire Rescue chief Steve Robinson says those sprinklers would require a significant amount of water in a larger neighbourhood.

“Just to give you an idea on the magnitude of water, those sprinklers that go on the rooftops, they take about five gallons per minute. Two per house, and if we did 1,000 homes with that, that’s 10,000 gallons of water per minute that have to be supplied. So there’s some challenges there with that.”

Using 10,000 gallons of water per minute for 24 hours would use 91 per cent of the city’s daily water supply, which is 160 million litres.

Utility services manager Greg Wightman says there’s good water supply for Juniper but other outlying neighbourhoods have less water.

“The best approach is to conserve the water for the folks who are using it tactically. So that’s been our stance here, is we’re not overly supportive of that [rooftop sprinklers] because we do have a fire department that’s able to respond and we do have infrastructure to provide water to that group.”

Logan Lake fire chief Doug Wilson said three months ago he expects about half of the homes in the town would be equipped with irrigation sprinklers by the end of this year, in case of a wildfire evacuation.

BC Wildfire Service structure protection specialist Neill Moroz said the goal of equipping evacuated homes with irrigation sprinklers is to create a “humidity bubble” which the fire front will go around.