Premier John Horgan is pledging a budget boost to allow a new “12-month approach” to fighting wildfires.
Horgan was in Logan Lake with Forestry Minister Katrine Conroy to thank firefighters and community members for their efforts to preserve the town, which escaped a near miss with the Tremont Creek wildfire earlier this month.
“(Budget 2022) will have at its centre a commitment to making sure we’re better prepared, as best prepared as we can be for the fire seasons that are coming ahead of us. Climate change is here to stay. We need to take steps to protect people, to protect communities, to protect property,” Horgan said.
The District of Logan Lake was a pioneer of the B.C. FireSmart program, which helps communities and individuals prepare ahead of time to reduce fire risks, and Conroy credited that approach Friday with helping protect the town.
“We want to make sure we’re duplicating this across the province, that it’s happening quickly, and that might take a few years, but it is well worth it,” she said.
Horgan said he has heard concerns from civic and First Nations leaders about the instability of year-round funding for FireSmart and other fire prevention initiatives, and was looking at “every tool” available to reduce risk, such as more prescribed burns in the off-season.
He said the province was looking at more funding to allow the BC Wildfire Service to work on prevention with communities and homeowners before and after the fire seasons.
“The way we have fought fires in B.C. historically, going back many, many years, is a notional amount of money in the budget, and if you overspend that, you just find it through contingencies. I don’t believe we should be putting our communities at risk based on contingencies,” Horgan said.
“If we have resources at the front end of the year, BC Wildfire Service can retain people to do the work to assist with FireSmart, to make sure we’re doing the best we can to create guards and other scenarios around those interface communities, and that’s just got to be the way we go forward.”
More than 2,000 people were evacuated from Logan Lake earlier this month due to a threat from the raging Tremont Creek wildfire.
The fire actually breached the municipal boundaries of the town, but firefighters were able to prevent any homes from being destroyed. Residents were cleared to return last Thursday.
On Thursday the 635-square-kilometre Tremont Creek fire and 742-square-kilometre Flat Lake fire, both wildfires of concern, were reclassified as “being held,” meaning they weren’t expected to grow under forecast conditions.
Fire officials said the province was “trending in the right direction,” and that they were cautiously optimistic a significant number of evacuation orders and alerts could be downgraded in the coming days.
The BC Wildfire Service says there have been more than 1,500 fires so far this year, burning more than 8,600 square kilometres of land .