Claudia Cornwall - British Columbia in Flames

British Columbia in Flames

Claudia Cornwall

British Columbia in Flames

Stories from a Blazing Summer

Copyright 2020 Claudia Cornwall

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, .

Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC , V0N 2H0

www.harbourpublishing.com

Images by Gordon Cornwall except for pages XIII (top) and XIV (bottom) by Linda Botterill; pages VI (bottom) and VII (all) by Jesaja Class; page XI (bottom) by Shawn Cropley; page XIII (bottom) and cover by Eric Depenau; page III and pages VII and IX (top) by Bailey Fuller; page I (top) by Bob Grant; page XV (bottom) by Kevin Haggkvist; page 72 by Andra Holzapfel; page IV (top) by Bryan Johns; page XIV (top) by Joanne Macaluso; page II (top) by Brad Pierro; page 219 by Brad Potter; pages X (bottom), XI (top), XII (both) by Steven Seibert; page II (bottom) by Wanda Shep; pages 117 and 119 by Samantha Smolen; page XV (top) by Wolfgang Viertel; pages IX (bottom) and X (top) by Krista Vieira; and page VIII (bottom) by Barb Woodburn.

Edited by Pam Robertson

Indexed by Ellen Hawman

Cover design by Setareh Ashrafologhalai

Text design by Carleton Wilson and Becky Pruitt MacKenney

Printed and bound in Canada

Harbour Publishing acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: British Columbia in flames : stories from a blazing summer / Claudia Cornwall.

Names: Cornwall, Claudia Maria, author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200183885 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200183907 | ISBN 9781550178944 (softcover) | ISBN 9781550178951 ( HTML )

Subjects: LCSH : WildfiresBritish Columbia. | LCSH : WildfiresSocial aspectsBritish Columbia.

Classification: LCC SD 421.34.C3 C67 2020 | DDC 363.37/9dc23

To the people of the Cariboo-Chilcotin , whose courage and resourcefulness are so inspiring.

What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

Charles Bukowski Fences were a common casualty during the fires. Over a thousand kilometres of them burned.

July 7, 2017, is a day many British Columbians will never forget. A day like no otherunprecedented, they say. Mayor John Ranta was standing on his front lawn in Cache Creek when he saw fire aiming straight for him. Andra Holzapfel noticed smoke curling over a mountain and heading toward her just after she had unpacked her canoe in Bowron Lake Provincial Park. Flying south in a Twin Otter from Fort St. John, Jeremy Sieb noted smoke columns at Otter Lake, Dragon Mountain and south of Quesnel on the west side of the Fraser River. Chief Francis Laceese saw plumes on his way from Kamloops to the Toosey First Nation in Riske Creek. In the Walmart parking lot in Williams Lake, Raylene Poffenroth snapped photographs of several fires erupting on the horizon. Kurt Van Ember witnessed lightning strikes as he was driving west along Highway 20. We are going to be in for one hell of a ride, he said. The fires descended like a pride of dragons, roaring and snorting. They were fast-moving and everywhere. The BC Wildfire Service was stretched to the limit and didnt even get to all the fires reported.

The Elephant Hill, HancevilleRiske Creek and Plateau Complex fires started on July 7. They stormed across British Columbia, growing ever larger, seemingly unstoppable. Glen Burgess, an incident commander for several fires, told me during an interview at the Kamloops Fire Centre, Ideally on a fire, you go in and you take action and you put it out. But when a fire is a hundred kilometres long by seventy kilometres wide, you cant have people on every inch of that. The growth was so volatile and there were times we couldnt put our people out there. We had to let these fires do their thing. When the smoke is thick and its heavy, you cant fly aircraft. You cant operate safely. And really its about Mother Nature at that point. The Plateau fire was the largest single fire in the provinces history. It eventually extended over 545,000 hectares and came to within 60 kilometres of Quesnel. By the time these dragons gasped their last, they had consumed a total of 1.2 million hectaresthats 1.3 percent of BC , an area more than twice the size of PEI and slightly bigger than Lebanon.

Chief Francis Laceese saw plumes as he was driving from Kamloops to the Toosey Nation.

Summer fires are a familiar occurrence in British Columbia. They have scored and shaped the province, causing devastation as well as renewal. Our natural spaces have developed through exposure to fires, and many of our plants and animals are exquisitely adapted to them. Lodgepole pines depend on heat for their seeds to germinate, a phenomenon called pyriscence. Their cones are sealed with a resin that melts when exposed to fire and then the seeds are released. Fireweed and huckleberries flourish on the sites of burned forests, taking advantage of the extra nutrients in the ashy soil and the additional sunshine available due to tree loss.

Fire beetles fly eagerly toward forest fires to mate and deposit their eggs under the bark of smouldering trees. Dying trees are hospitable environments for the beetles because they no longer secrete the juicy resins healthy trees use to flush out invading insects. Woodpeckers follow the beetles, attracted by their succulence. Bears, which are opportunistic omnivores, arrive somewhat later when food sources such as huckleberries get established. And deer come, lured by the lush meadows that eventually grow in the new clearings.

People, too, have used landscape fires to serve their own ends. Historians have found evidence dating back to the 1700s of First Nations in the Pacific Northwest burning for various purposesamong other things, to make clearings around their villages, to create pasture for their horses and game, and to make space for growing medicinal herbs and food. According to forester John Parminter, they relied on fires to promote the cultivation of at least eighteen different species of plants. Sometimes these burns escaped, but for the most part the Indigenous people had techniques to control them. The result was a patchwork of forest and grassland, resistant to catastrophic fires.

New settlers, prospectors and lumbermen also set fires, on occasion quite carelessly. In 1915, H.R. MacMillan, who was Chief Forester at the time and later one of BC s most famous lumber barons, observed: