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.

This one, too.

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.