From this thread, posted earlier today.
I spent many years with the MOF Initial Attack in the BC interior and live there still. It’s difficult to describe how much things have changed from the days when all able-bodied males could be drafted to fight fire. Your choice was go to the fire or go to jail. Thankfully that doesn’t happen anymore but the old idea that you had to establish control on a fire by 10:00 has gone out the window as official policy. This allows fires to build up quite nicely as heat of the day progresses. Also, no one can set foot on a fire until an official has examined it for any safety problems. My friends in the logging industry can’t legally touch a fire except maybe one that starts on the landing, but lightning strikes – no way.
So, those are just a few of the myriad of problems that I have seen in the last several years which result in fires burning for weeks without anyone around and then when the wind kicks up like it did in BC in the last few weeks and days all hell breaks loose. This is a disaster that has been brewing for years and has now blown up. Of course, after the last Kelowna fire an inquiry was held and things got worse, not better. Will the latest round result in changes? I honestly don’t know.
I was a professional forester and worked in the forest industry on the Coast since 1974. When I started, we were progressively clear cutting which meant that we could design a logging block adjacent to a previous block only after it had been considered “abated” which means the fine fuels in the slash had either been burned off or decayed and “greened up” to where there was little chance of a ground fire spreading. We could continue to do this up until we came up to the next primary fire break which consisted of an old growth vertical corridor half a mile wide transecting an entire valley (spaced every few miles) which slowed or stopped most fires quite well. We burned a lot of slash which lowered the risk of fire spread. It meant that during fall and increasingly in the spring there was fire smoke around. As the public complained, we did less burning until we eventually did virtually none and as of 5 years ago the regulations around air quality made broadcast burning next to impossible. Successive governments pressured by the public forced cut blocks to become smaller and more scattered which may have looked better but resulted in more wind felled and destroyed timber, less opportunity to safely burn slash and higher risks from pests. The industry has lost most of its people who had fire fighting experience and rely more on government forest service to take that on. My only advice is that people need to know that they can choose their poison: more smoke in the off season or a lot more smoke and damage during the fire season. I did a consulting project a few years after the last major fire fried the Eastern hills of Kelowna on the status of municipal progress in fire-proofing communities and one of my conclusions was that the public didn’t want to see the kind of measures taken that could address some of the risk. Politicians scramble to get in front of the mob.
No, it won’t change anything.
The Collectivist CLIMATE CHANGE Narrative shall not be altered or changed. The NDP nor the Liberal United whatever party, both climey changey devotees, will continue the Globalist Agenda, despite inconvenient facts
Four of the last five summers in Kelowna were average, to slightly below long-term average, for temperatures and drought conditions. Climate may indeed be changing, but these fires are the result of industrial-scale incompetence and mismanagement. Canada is currently the Soviet Union, circa 1985. The big collapse is coming.
If clear cutting is allowed … then who gives a shit what it looks like? Why? Because I’ve driven through Yellowstone after the pyromaniacs in the US Forest Dept. determined that fire was “natural” and needed “to germinate some type of tree” … it turned Yellowstone into a horrific wasteland. Sad and pathetic looking. It looked worse than a clear cut.
Oh … and BTW loggers need to clean up the slash … as I’ve hiked through it in the mountains above the BC inlets … and it is horrifically horrible. Not only for adding to the ground fire load … but as impassable as anything I’ve ever hiked.
No, I’m not the least bit anti-logging … so long as it is done with reasonable environmental protections and reforestation practices. And yes, I know the value of slash in providing humus for future growth.
Kenji – I used to tell people “We should sue BC for the impact on our air quality from their forest fires “. I was assuming some form of government incompetence. Maybe there is a case for it. If Greens can sue oil companies for climate change, capitalists should start suing governments for incompetence.
Sue them because they KNEW poor forest management would lead to wildfires. In fact they bragged about it … and wished for it
They’ve announced “travel restrictions” in BC now. This is something that would have been unheard of before the covid scamdemic.
The travel restrictions are aimed at dissuading tourists from coming to areas like Kelowna, where I live. They are also suggesting that tourists leave, as there are thousands of evacuated people and a need for places to stay.
I am in principle opposed to restrictions, but the intent of this one makes sense.
Left Scotch Creek campsite on Shuswap Aug 17 @ 5:15pm when park folks told us we were on alert, with the next evac order giving one about 10 min to move. In the morning we had a blanket of ash on the car & tent. Took a some pics from Celiste around noon that day and you couldn’t see the south shore of Shuswap.
Lee Creek bridge got some water sprinklers installed as it is a wooden bridge. Flagging personnel were there as fire was already on the ridge on both sides of Lee Creek. Smoke was increasingly worse.
Watched the rest on twatter as 40-50% of Scotch Creek became burn material from home.
Survival instincts and skillz are still pretty good.
Cheers
C in C
1st St Nicolaas Army
Army Group True North
I spent 11 years in the BC Forest Service and worked on the fires every season. The big advantage we had back in the 60’s and 70’s was every town had a Ranger Station with A/R/s who knew the area and we had fire lookouts at strategic points.
We had the names of hundreds of men ready to go, most experienced loggers and mill workers, iow guys who were used to hard work.
We could have a crew ready within an hour and off to the fire. The method used then was to hit it early as possible with as many FF’s and equipment as we could get,and there was lots of those.
The use of helicopters and water bombers, which we were told in the 80’s to call “aerial tankers”, was restricted to the biggest fires and often we fought the less glamorous fires with just men and equipment, the fabulous D-8 Cat was indispensible.
I have no idea how fire fighting is done today as I left the BCFS in 1984, but they did change the name to BC Wildfire Service, gave the guys snappy red coveralls and employed nice young women to give the media daily reports.
The terrain in the Okanagan is so steep there isn’t much use for Cats, so it seems the majority of the IA is done by water bombers and helicopters. I don’t know what goes on on the ground.
But we can rest assured the BC Liberal United Party will excoriate the current government over the current state of emergency and tell everyone they will do a much better job. And of course that’s complete bullshit. But that’s what politicians do.
I was with the BC Forest Service from ’65 to ’72. We had suppression crews (8 students working a summer job plus a foreman) attached to Ranger Stations. The idea was to hit a fire as fast as possible after discovery and prevent it becoming big. Bombers were used if it looked like it might get out of hand and get big. Once a fire takes off, nothing can be done to stop it, all up to the weather.
Logging companies were required to take action on any fire they saw.
Fast forward 30 years. Ranger Stations are long gone, amalgamated into huge centralized forest districts. A local helicopter logging crew witnessed a lightning strike start a fire halfway up a mountain. They called the Forest Service to report it, and said we have a monsoon bucket for our chopper, would you like us to dump some water on it. Forest Service ordered them to take no action until they sent a forest service person out to “assess” it. Took him 2 hours to drive out there, by that time it was 20 acres and the next day it was 300.
The drought is a major reason for the current fire situation, but the professionals who have dismissed the knowledge of decades past are a big contributing factor.
Ain’t bureaucracy grand. Government will bury us. Time to fix government, by reducing it.
That last sentence is very true. I worked for rangers whose career harkened back to the days they patrolled their district on horseback, but most of them were demoted, dumped, or offered early retirement in the Great reorganization of 1980. We lost a hell of a lot of knowledge when those guys were forced out,and their replacements were politically savvy types, not men dedicated to the job.
I was also dumped for a young tech school type who didn’t even know his tree species except in a book. (A little bitterness there).
I’d forgotten the student crews until you mentioned them. We had some great kids come to work for us in the summer. One young fellow who was particularly sharp became Canada’s ambassador to Thailand or Cambodia.
The “profession” is more interested in protecting their “right to practice” than defending practicing unpopular but proven forestry. I resigned even as a non-practicing retiree as I got tired of their fixations on “indigenous knowledge”, “climate hysteria” and sucking up to governments. I agree with your points. I witnessed the introduction of the cookbook preharvest silviculture prescription having to be signed off by professionals which ended the upward mobility of talented or experienced “dirt forester” technicians. It’s one of many reasons why I am against the legislated “right to practice” monopoly of any and all professions.
Except BC was unusually cold and wet this spring. Tons of ground water and the high bush country is actually more moist than usual (mineral soil underneath humus layer has very high water content at the moment).
I was listening to the Scan BC channel today for radio traffic in Kelowna. Rest assured the Penticton Band Chief was getting a tour of the fire… I guarantee he added nothing of value other than checking a box for consultation or whatever the hell the protocol is these days. This country is truly lost.
Giving the “public” what they want … helluva way to run a railroad.
In the mid eighties, a group of us, being avid hunters (moose, elk, whitetail) established our ‘camp’ in the Porcupine Forest area- generally a bloc to the SW of the town of Hudson Bay. Sk.
Sections of the forest were constantly clearcut for the timber, but all the slash was pushed up on piles, the land scarified (impossible to drive a quad thru, but a lot better 10 years later), piles burned the next winter. It pissed us off at the time that some of our favorite spots were wiped out, but you know what? 3 years later that area was even better!
In those 35+ years, none of the area has been hit with a so called ‘forest fire’,(same can’t be said for the Sask wilderness region way further north), so obviously there are some adults in charge somewhere, altho we did venture into the Smokey Burn that had happened a couple of years prior. Wasn’t huge but was just starting to recover.
Would seem there’s a whole lot of office desk experts runnin’ things these days that have no idea what that thing called a work boot is!
I
Government experts.
They now spend decades training for this emergency..And then fail miserably when expected to do the work.
And after procrastinating,dithering ,ass kissing and checking all the boxes,they declare a “State of Emergency” demanding we respect their authority even further.
New Rules.
Any government minion declaring “State of Emergency” shall follow said confession of incompetence with their permanent resignation.
These idiots insist only they have the expertise,on pain of law none other shall intrude,then they screw things up beyond any sane expectation.. And then they hang around insisting that the mess they created requires them to have extraordinary powers to prevent us from cleaning up their mess.
This pattern is becoming quite blatant.
Whatever “Help” means in government speak,all I know is I do not accept their “help” for harm is sure to fall upon me.
I am sure I can blame “language problems” for ignoring the hired help, when ordered to act against my best interests,because “Its an emergency”…All I can say is “Sorry I don’t speak retard”.
This comment from Bunny fits here too.
Bunny
August 20, 2023 at 12:56 am
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_1910
This reminds me of the Hinckley Fire of 1894. At least 400 dead, but it overran a whole lot of farms with no records of who or how many.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hinckley_Fire
You can’t let science get in the way of scientism. Whether it’s biology, or climate, or medicine, you must believe first, then tailor the “science” to the required belief. It’s called being progressive, duh.
Money money.. Green more or less means you get nothing but a plaque declaring a natural habitat.. Raises, promotions and benefits all around with the savings built into doing nothing.. Its little wonder government workers are green..
The phrase I was looking for “A cascade of incompetence”
Where poor decisions pile up on top of each other,the actual fire fighters are laid off and sidelined,while the bureaucracy continues to expand exponentially.
Government,at all levels,will respond to this years fire season,with promotions alround and demands to expand the bureau of nitwits who caused these problems,excess fuel on ground,lack of preparedness and local knowledge of the ground.along with arson and hysteria..
Guaranteed the people most responsible will get awards and bonuses.
And the fire breaks will grow back up,while the Gang Greens argue over where the other ones can’t go.
And of course,Team Chaos will legislate even more draconian powers and punishments to use against all who doubt their judgement.
I have this sense we are one more “natural” disaster from full on civil war.
For our “Dear Leaders” can’t and don’t,yet they are too stupid and self important to be aware of their lack.