Canada’s bushfire containment capacity has shrunk for decades due to budget cuts, the loss of some of the country’s forestry service staff and complicated fire rules, turning some forests of Canada into a bonfire.
As residents brace for the worst wildfire season on record and far from over, the air cleared in the Northeast US on Friday, but hundreds of wildfires continued to burn across Canada. .
Thanks to rain and cloud cover near bushfire areas, sporadic rain is expected in parts of southern Ontario on Sunday, said Steven Flisfeder, meteorologist prepared for warnings at Environment and Variables. Climate Change Canada, predicts that the weekend could bring better air quality in Toronto, the country’s largest city.
“That would help remove a bit of a pollutant from the air,” he said.
More than 1,100 firefighters from around the world have been deployed across Canada to help combat the raging wildfire season in the country, officials said, including groups from France, Chile, Costa Rica, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
Wildfire emergency response management is handled by each of the 10 provinces and three territories in Canada, but hundreds of fires across the country have drained local resources and renewed call on the national fire service.
At a time when many Canadians are asking if the country has the resources to fight wildfires, some experts say the government should focus on doing all it can to prevent wildfires, an important center that the government has strayed from since budget cuts in the 1990s. the nation’s forestry service.
“We need to do more to tackle the problem,” said Mike Flannigan, who studies wildfires at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, a community at the heart of that province’s wildfire nation. subject. “And that progress has been slow, mainly because we’re stuck in this paradigm that putting out fires is the solution.”
Those who study the Canadian response say it has been weakened by many forces, including cuts to local and national budgets for forests, cumbersome protections to prevent fires, and drastic reductions in human numbers. forestry service officer.
British Columbia spent C$801 million (about US$601 million) fighting wildfires during the unusually hot 2021 wildfire season. the fire wiped out the town of Lytton. But the province’s current wildfire prevention budget is only $32 million a year.
Similar disparities exist in other provinces, where there is a tendency to invest in small, community-based programs to protect villages and towns rather than mitigate wildfire risk, increasing the risk of forest fires. Wildfires out of control.
Small programs have been very helpful, including measures such as clearing forest floors on the periphery of towns and creating fire-suppression points between settlements and forests. However, experts say to mitigate widespread wildfires, broader measures are needed.
One of the fire prevention methods that Canada should expand on is regulated burns, experts say. burn a specific area under controlled conditions to burn trees, twigs, bushes and other materials that can fuel wildfires.
It also stimulates ecological restoration, clearing tree cover to allow sunlight to reach the forest floor and promote new growth, as well as opening the cones of certain tree species to release seeds.
“It’s a great technique, but we haven’t used it much in Canada,” said Daniel Perrakis, a fire scientist at the Canadian Forest Service. “With climate change, we’re clearly seeing different fire behavior.”
Some communities of indigenous people – people forest fires disproportionate impact because they often live in fire-prone areas – used to controlled burning.
Two years ago, while a record heatwave exacerbated wildfires across British Columbia, several blazes broke out near Westbank First Nation, an indigenous community in the Okanagan Valley. But many years of thinning the forest and managing land use culture burning custom prevent the fire from causing any major damage to the community.
Across Canada, there are a number of controlled burns each year, according to part of the figures compiled by National Forest Database. Foresters who want to implement them have to go through a lengthy process to get provincial approval.
Burns are uncommon in places like public parks, and even more so when they go wrong. In 1995, More than 1,000 people had to be evacuated after a prescribed burn spiraled out of control and threatened the town of Dubreuilville, Ontario.
During some fire seasons, the approval process time exceeds the narrow timeframe when weather conditions are favorable for burn control.
The rules reduce the risk of an out-of-control fire by regulation, but they increase the risk of an out-of-control wildfire.
“You have basically tied the hands of the people – the foresters and the silviculturalists – who cannot successfully escape regulatory burns because we make the rules too strict and too restrictive” causes more wildfire fuel to be left on the forest floor, said Sarah Bros, an expert. ranger and co-owner at Merin Forest Management based in North Bay, Ontario, who performed the regulated burning. “Harvest does not do what mother nature does.”
The budget cuts in the late 1990s, led by the then prime minister, Paul Martin – were called “deficit killer” — affected several government agencies, shrinking Forest Service of Canada staff size between 2,200 and 700 people it currently uses.
“There’s been a meltdown,” said Edward Struzik, a fellow at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen’s University in Ontario and author of the book Dark Days at Noon: The Future of Fire. amazing brainpower.
“People have been mutilated, and continue to be mutilated, because of the fact that we have an ongoing situation, this new fire model and the forestry agency is having to change a lot to deal with it,” he said. decide it.
Dan Bilefsky Contribution reports from Montreal. Remy Tumin contributed reporting from New York.
